Openwork: Highline Restaurant NYC
Sawad Brooks, Phillip Tiongson, Damián Barragán.
We were commissioned to design a digital installation for the new (2004) "Highline" restaurant, located in New York's trendy "Meat Packing District." Playing with the visual themes being used by the restaurant's designer, Kit Thahong, as well as the history of the Meat Packing District, we designed a virtual waterway that would flow through the restaurant, including the length of the bar and the restrooms, providing a parade of variations on illumination as well as suspense and visual interest -- a little bit like a giant lava lamp.
The installation uses more than 20 screens embedded into the architectural design of the restaurant, such as along the bar, to provide “portholes” into the simulated, continuous waterway, within which fluid, surreal forms (abstract representations of meat and other foods) flow gently and tumble over each other, from porthole to porthole. Custom software (see "OVERFLOW" product) for creating real-time, multi-screen animations enables the colorful artwork to travel from one screen to another, as if within one long, continuous screen.
Sensors at the bar enable the installation to respond to customers’ presence in real-time, alerting bartenders by glowing with orange coloration, and playfully responding to the passing bartenders by adding a cool blue to the fluid mixture. Touch sensors on the bar's surface allow customers to "unroll" and "roll back up" the animated drink list within the portholes.
