Iwagumi Air Scape Creates a Mountainous Ravine in The Middle of Melbourne
The Australian premiere of Iwagumi Air Scape by Melbourne art and technology studio ENESS has sprung up in Prahran Square in a monumental celebration of the beauty of wild spaces.
The word Iwagumi highlights the Japanese reverence towards beautiful rock formations found in nature. ENESS has adopted this principle to create Iwagumi Air Scape, a larger-than-life rock garden which transforms urban areas into a surreal landscape overnight.
By day, visitors can explore immense air-filled inflatables that appear to be thousands of tonnes of rock. As the sun sets, the artwork transforms with a vibrant display of colour and an interactive soundscape inspired by nature’s gentle inhabitants.
Iwagumi Air Scape is designed to be placed in the middle of a city, sharply contrasting features of the wilderness with the urban environment.
“Through this artwork we are celebrating how Japanese people acknowledge and recognise nature as the ultimate designer in terms of composition. Culturally, the Japanese admire and respect natural forms such as rock formations, observing these compositions in great detail, which they then translate into various artforms. This is evidenced by rock gardens in spiritual places, in civic spaces, in small domestic gardens and aquariums through aquascaping,” Artist and Founder of ENESS Nimrod Weis said.
In creating this ode to rock formations, Iwagumi Air Scape is patterned with intricate rock textures – from photographs of granite. This attention to detail achieves an additional optical feat, whereby the 16 air-filled inflatables are transformed into what appears to be real rock.
“There is a huge element of surprise in this work, when visitors touch the artworks and realise that in fact, they are inflatable,” Nimrod said.
As an additional sensory experience, crevices have been created throughout the intricate formation, creating opportunities to squeeze through the inflatable rocks along sections as long as 10 metres, as if traversing a real canyon.
The accompanying soundscape creates a highly textured environment including sounds of birds, night frogs, crickets, monkeys, bats and mountain streams. As the audience moves through the installation each rock triggers different sounds randomly adding to the overall auditory collage.
In further reinforcement about the expanse of cities and the effect that modern life has had on nature, deep within the formation, nearby street sounds penetrate the silence, posing the question about our relationship with wilderness in the modern world.
“Our creative practice interrogates the relationship between the virtual and physical worlds. In this case, we created digital rocks that are printed and illuminated but exist in space as convincing natural forms. The fact that these artificial objects can help in reconnecting people with nature says a lot about our world at this time,” Nimrod Weis said.
This work seeks to bring harmony, monumentality, and a sense of awe into an urban experience, reconnecting us with a fundamental resonance of nature and the earth.
Iwagumi Air Scape will continue to amaze visitors to Prahran Square until 17 August, after which it will continue its world tour – next stop, Spain.
Nimrod Weis – Artist
Melbourne artist Nimrod Weis is a sculptor and technologist. Co-founder of ENESS: a multidisciplinary design studio founded in 1997, whose work explores the intersection between the virtual and the physical world to create a unique brand of interactive public art installations.
Nimrod is a passionate provocateur – constantly seeking to challenge the way we view cities and their spaces and share ways in which our shared experiences of technology and art bond us together. His work increasingly seeks to make art accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds.
Together with his team at ENESS he delves into the deeper potential of interactivity to form emotive responses from audiences through playful and accessible work that seduces viewers to get closer and experience unexpected curiosities, taking digital art installations out of the gallery and into the realm of public space.
STUDIO BIO
Founded in 1997, ENESS is a multi-award-winning art and technology studio. The multidisciplinary team explores the intersection between the virtual and the physical world in the creation of temporary and permanent interactive public art. Pioneers of new media art, ENESS artworks combine sculpture, textiles, design, furniture, software development, music and story.
Led by Artist and Founder Nimrod Weis, the team delves into the deeper potential of interactivity to form emotive responses from audiences and how to make art appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds. The studio’s style of work seduces viewers to get closer and experience unexpected curiosities, taking digital art installations out of the gallery and into the realm of public space. The team’s work questions how we view cities and their spaces and share ways in which technology and art bond us together.
ENESS believes in the power of providing art in everyday life that fires the imagination; that provides joy, happiness and beauty in unexpected places – transformational experiences that change lives. In this way the team are ‘happiness architects’, inspiring deeper moments between friends, family, and community.
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ENESS interactive installations are commissioned by urban and cultural precincts, festivals, galleries, and museums of modern art worldwide.
Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine 