DS Tableau

DS Tableau

DS Tableau is a large-scale sculptural installation with animated lights and text-scrollers, installed at the entrance to the local offices of an international corporation in Cape Town, South Africa. It is a SPACECRAFT project, the sister project to African Robots, executed with Southern African street wire artists who are highly skilled at constructing accurate, complex designs in galvanised steel wire.

As with our previous project Dubship I – Black Starliner (2019), this project employed a range of high-tech approaches combined with hand-craft. Working with Jason Stapleton of Ambient3D, we developed 3D models in Virtual Reality to design and inhabit the work. We used these 3D models to make polystyrene templates cut by a computer-controlled router, which wire artists could use to produce real-life ‘wire frames’. We had up to 10 wire artists at a time working on the installation! Meanwhile, our friends at Thingking took on the fabrication of the support structure and lighting and text elements.

Our project got a write-up by the project ‘100 Beautiful Things‘.

For some more images and videos of our process, check out our documentation on Instagram at @spacecraft.africa or @ralphborland