Janet Echelman’s fiber sculptures billow, rise, and fall like iridescent bubbles hanging from a spider’s web. Flexible and full of motion, the nets look soft, but they’re also strong. Their structural cables are made from ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, a lightweight material that’s 15 times stronger than steel by weight. Echelman’s colorful, large-scale installations rely on engineers to keep them in place, as gravity, wind and projected light change their forms. Adobe features her work in the video above.
Below, Echelman explains how her team installed “As If It Were Already Here,” a huge one-ton sculpture, over a section of Boston’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in 2015.
Explore more of Echelman’s work on her site and in her TED Talk, where she explains how traditional crafts and modern technologies come together to create her city installations:
Next: A million things that make your head spin and The ORBIS FLY kinetic light system at the Leningrad Center. Plus, some rope dynamics: A homemade string shooter & slow-moving waves in rope and two turbines and a rope: Waves by Daniel Palacios.This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
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