Liquid
Tarih: Date
LIQUID aims to attract attention to the problem of ever-increasing plastic wastes and create awareness by reusing the waste plastic bottles in a spatial installation.
Spatial Installations have the potential to highly differentiate the perceptual qualities of the space they are located in, together with an extended effect on the visitors' perceptions. The developments in design and manufacturing technologies in the last decade created the possibility of spatial installations to become an integral constituent of design and space. LIQUID is a spatial installation of such and it is the first of its kind in TEDU.
LIQUID is composed of 1260 plastic bottles, 200 of which were collected during the TEDU Spring Festival and the rest from different spots within the TEDU campus. Benefiting from the compressibility of the material, the design team customized the height of the bottles to create a wavy surface. To develop the surface, the team studied a range of alternatives in Grasshopper, a visual and highly versatile algorithmic design tool as an extension of Rhinoceros. Then they devised an algorithm for computing the dimensions, which works by mapping the black levels of a grayscale image to a predetermined range to define the heights of each plastic bottle. By changing the grayscale image, the necessary data could be instantly varied and easily produced.
The plastic bottles are mounted to four 1000 mm by 1425 mm acrylic panels by the help of steel rods. At each panel, there are 17 or 18 vertical arrays. Each array has 18 elements and a total of 324 or 306 elements with a total of 1260 bottles are present in each of the four panels. The bottle heights on the panels range from 50 to 205 millimeters. The height value of each bottle is etched on the lower side of the panels and the bottles are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Each bottle and its caps are drilled to place the bottles on steel rods. On every steel rod, with the help of nuts, the plastic bottles were transformed into determined heights via squeezing. The final height value of each bottle created a wavy surface, 4 meters wide. While numerous many parameters, data, criteria were precisely controlled in LIQUID, the only thing that could not be controlled was the color of the caps, as the brands of the bottles to be collected were unpredictable and the colors of the caps of the brands changed drastically.
The Team: Doruk Özkoç, Emre Şimşek, Asya Büyükerk, Aylin Şen, Gökçe Naz Soysal, Semihcan Esin, Uğur Çınar
Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Gökhan Kınayoğlu
Location: E Block 3rd floor
