Simulating the relationship between power and control.

Demonstration

Wave your arm across the wall to create a giant flourish of light. OverPowered uses accelerometers to amplify your conjuring gestures into magical displays. But beware your fervor, if you strike too hard, you will destroy the system. OverPowered is an exercise in controlling power.

Swinging your arms to command herds of stars: the stuff of Fantasia. Using accelerometers, I wanted to recreate the experience atop the mountain inThe Sorcerers Apprentice from Disney’s Fantasia. The Sorcerers Apprentice is the premier story about the ambivalent nature of power. It is derived from the ancient story of the golem: an inanimate figure brought to life by magic to serve its creator, but the creator soon realizes that he cannot control his creation. Power and control have an intimate and often inverse relationship, where the greatest power cannot be controlled.

While working on OverPowered and The Credit Crisis Visualized concurrently, I began to see a similarity in each project’s narrative. While the apprentice (Mickey) created the broom to haul water out of the well for him, so similarly did the captains of Wall Street create derivative securities to haul profit out of bad mortgages. Both lost control. To use Tom Wolfe’s term, these Masters of the Universe used their incredible power to create the very situation responsible for their downfall.

In relation to the project Process as Drawing, OverPowered began to explore the idea of harnessing creative energy and wielding it on a level approaching that of destruction. Destructive action creates incredible amplifications, like the shudder of a finger tumbling a house of cards. The epitome of destructive action is the imploding of a building, with one push of a detonator, an entire building collapses in several awe-inspiring seconds. Magic is a synonym for this awe, and has always referred to the ability to control amplifications like this, especially in the creative direction. What if you could “magically” create a building in a matter of seconds?

New technology allows us to create experiences closer and closer to magic, financial or otherwise. We continue to test these powers to their limits, resulting in our continuous boom-and-bust cycles.

Presentation

Testing

Mock-up

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