While the installation at the ZKM has a permanent site-specific design, the Web of Life’s four remote installations need to fulfill specific pragmatic criteria relating to the fact that they are traveling between various locations throughout the world over a long period of time. Two designs for these traveling installations have been developed, and both employ the use of a new holographic glass screen technology that allows the projected images to appear to float freely in space while being presented in fully illuminated surroundings. The form and functionality of the hand scanning interfaces at the traveling installations are identical to that of the interface used in the permanent installation at the ZKM.

The suspended version (Wolff-Plottegg and Böhm) is a modular tensegrity structure made of tubes and cables in which practically all the equipment is hung, including the speakers (made of glass) and the transparent projection screen. Only the hand scanning unit is floor mounted, and even here there is a wireless LAN connection to the hanging structure. The result is an immaterial and fluent embodiment of the network principal that allows itself to be connected to the host environment in various ways appropriate to each location. While this modular design needs a fairly large and suitable space, its constellation of cables and tubes suspended in midair presents a strategy of architectural dematerialization, the indeterminate geometry of which constitutes an elegant metaphor for the dynamic web of relationships that is the subject of the artwork.

The design of the floor mounted version (Shaw) is an elegantly restrained and functional enclosure of all the necessary equipment (computers, projector, etc.), the formalistic focus of which is the surface, where the visitors are invited to scan their hand lines, and the holographic back-projection screen where the projected imagery is seen. Six speakers are fixed to a simple framework that is hung from the ceiling or, alternately, mounted on stands. The precise design and small footprint of the overall construction facilitate the ease of its on-site installation, as well as its capacity to be integrated into almost any kind of indoor environment: a room, gallery, hallway, foyer, etc.

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