Halocline Sky (2022) is a site-specific, urban intervention located in Tampa, Florida. Commissioned to create a welcoming gateway into the Water Street district, the artwork transforms a 200-foot skybridge into a multisensory, immersive environment.
Taking the local port as inspiration, the artwork celebrates the notion that diversity, interaction and exchange are at the heart of flourishing ecologies and cultures. Formed of molecule-like rings, animated with light, it brings life and dynamism to the cityscape.
In response to the unique, local environment, the artwork is choreographed to explore an interaction between liquids of different densities. Supporting a brackish marine ecosystem, the water in Tampa Bay contains more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. These specific conditions support more than 200 species of fish and the most diverse colonial waterbird nesting colonies in North America.
To celebrate this thriving ecology, and represent the meeting of river and ocean, the artwork displays fluid dynamic simulations as annular interactions of light. Influenced by the motion of passing cars and pedestrians, turbulent vortices appear and resolve in a lively, ever-evolving performance.
Halocline – ‘vertical zone in the oceanic water column in which salinity changes rapidly with depth’ (Encyclopedia Britannica)