Project profile: Oscillation

Ryan Swanson, Brooklyn (previously Tampa), USA

An interactive installation that uses sight, sound, and movement to spark community activity and social interaction through open-ended play.

Ryan Swanson produced A Guide for Creating a Playable City, a publication designed for municipalities, city officials, architects, planners, creatives, and institutions that advocates for the implementation of playful innovation within everyday city spaces. This was based on his experience delivering projects that put play at the heart of public spaces.

One such piece of work was the project, Oscillation, which took place in Clearwater, Florida. The downtown area of the city is a predominantly nine-to-five district. Outside of business hours, the area goes underused. The area lacks a positive identity, and so fails to attract citizens from surrounding communities. The City of Clearwater Redevelopment agency commissioned Urban Conga (Ryan’s company) to create an interactive piece of work that would animate the downtown corridor, contribute to its local identity, its economy and the health and wellbeing of residents in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The resulting interactive installation acts somewhat like a theremin, an unusual musical instrument that you can play without touching it. As you walk toward the piece, it plays different sounds and pitches depending on your distance from it. And as you move and dance around it, colours reflect and refract light in different ways based on your angle and position. Oscillation is made up of five parts that are deconstructed from a solid cube using a Voronoi algorithm. The crystal-like forms can be moved around and placed in a variety of formations. The result is a totally immersive experience that breaks down social barriers and fuels joyful conversations between strangers.

The installation sparked spontaneous playfulness and conversation between strangers and captured the imagination of city stakeholders. It demonstrated that smaller, creative interventions throughout the city could have immediate and lasting impact on the lives of their citizens – and create a more vibrant, active atmosphere in the city’s downtown region for tourists and residents alike.

A Guide for Creating a Playable City is free to download and was launched through Let’s create a Playable City, a three-week-long immersive exhibition in the city of Clearwater, Florida: “The city became so inspired by the ideas and vision of a “Playable City” that they came up with a playable agenda that will start next year.”