the one mysterious thing that will change
the way visitors think. This is the idea: If you
hold out your arms and make a big circle—or,
even better, stand together in a circle with a
few other people, holding hands—the Kinect
will see it, and inside the circle new ish will be
born. You’ll create a marine preserve.
The parameter Peterson is adjusting is,
essentially, the birth rate. It’s an odd idea,
and the question is whether there’s a way to
make it clear to visitors how the interactive
works, without drawing too much attention
to it, which would sacriice a bit of the magic.
So Peterson iddles with the birth rate. If it’s
low, the preserves regenerate the population
slowly, maybe unnoticeably. But if it’s high—
Alonso, from Interactive Experiences,
jumps into the middle of the room and circles
her arms. Fish explode into being. “Woooo!”
she yells, swiveling like a machine-gun tur-
ret, spraying newborn ish in every direction.
“Hold on!” Peterson says, getting up from
his desk. “I have to get some of these out.
There’s a maximum amount you can have.”
He starts stomping all over the ground.
It’s a star t.THE GALLERY
INSTALLATIONConstruction on the “Unseen Oceans” gal-
leries has been going on for three weeks. The
sixty-two-hundred-square-foot space has
been divided into a series of circular rooms
that w ill g uide v isitors deep under water, and
the contents of each room are slowly arriv-
ing. Bob Peterson (no relation to Brett),
Alonso’s animator, has dropped by to see the
45-by-9-foot screen that will show his ani-
mation of life-size sea creatures. It requires
a three-projector setup—something they’ve
never tried before. The screen looks good,
but the room, like most of the gallery space,
is still a mess, scattered with empty vitrines
and submarine parts and carts of tungsten
track lighting that was swapped out for UV.
Bob inds himself admiring the next room
over, which centers on an expanding steel
helix. Preparators attach ish to it. Some,
cast in soft foam, are speared and bolted into
place. Hard-resin models are glued to posts,
and then mounted on the rail.4 DAYS
UNTIL OPENINGTROUBLESHOOTINGBrett Peterson is up on a ladder, and Neva-
rez, the technologist, is playing with sand.
He’s rooting around in it, building moun-
tains and digging valleys. Digging down, all
the way down, in some cases, to the black tub
that holds the sand of this part of the exhibit,
the topography interactive.
Peterson is futzing with the settings on
another Xbox Kinect. As Nevarez reshapes
the mounds of sand, this Kinect reads the
heights of the mounds, and its companion
projector paints them with a landscape.
Peterson and Nevarez have set a certain
height as sea level. If Nevarez builds sand
up a little higher than “sea level,” Peterson
has programmed the projector to color it the
light ocher of a beach. A little bit higher still,
and it’s green grassy blufs. In Nevarez’s val-
leys, Peterson makes the color of the water
go from the turquoise of a lagoon to the inky
blue of the deep sea.
Except the network of Kinect and projec-
tor is not working quite right. The submarine
video game is boring the kids testing it (and
confusing adults), the ish in the conserva-
tion interactive are getting stuck behind
things, and Bob’s still working on the high-