What's 25 feet tall, covered in "flames," and is coming to San Francisco? No, it's not some new terrifying type of car. It's called "Soma", and it's an interactive sculpture built by the Flaming Lotus Girls, a San Francisco-based art collaborative known for creating gigantic interactive "fire" sculptures. And starting this spring, it will be stationed at Pier 14 for a year.
Made up of LED lights and steel, "Soma" is built to look -- and act like -- the cell body of a neuron -- it has two "nuclei" which interact with each other, and the center of each one is made to look like a spinning ball of fire.
The Flaming Lotus Girls' website describes "Soma" as "an interactive installation that investigates the very basis of intellectual communication" which "invites [participants] to be an active force in this communication, providing input via the controls, sharing their knowledge and creating messages of warmth."
Visitors to Pier 14 can push buttons -- "control the neurotransmission" -- to activate computer-controlled flame and LED light patterns, which move across the sculpture. "Soma" contains over 60 LED lights packages, and each package can output 16 million colors.
Before its San Francisco debut, "Soma" visited Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival, as well as (of course) Burning Man. Although the Flaming Lotus Girls are based in San Francisco, "Soma" will be the first one of their sculptures to be stationed in the City.
If you want to help raise funds for "Soma," you could attend the Flaming Lotus Girls' dance party at Public Works or donate.
Update: A previous version of this blog post stated that there would be fire on this display, but we've been informed that the fire will be substituted for by LED lights while it's stationed in San Francisco.
Comments are closed.
