Acrylic eggcrate screen

The acrylic eggcrate screen was developed to create soft boundaries between pods and pavilions in free space. They are conceived as signs to announce particular activities and screens to separate those activities, a hybrid of hedge and street sign, directing traffic and acting as navigational tools. The curved plan form allows for the generation of serpentine boundary groupings and the refracting eggcrate of acrylic fractures both light and image, creating semi-private zones while inciting voyeurism. The screen is designed to generate shifting and fractured perspectives for the moving viewer, emphasising the significance of the moving perspective. These partition screens can be used to shape space either as flow directors or as space shapers to create additional rooms in their own right.

The inspiration for the screen was a meditation on the character of television as a tactile and fragmented medium. The screen attempts to present an ambiguous and shifting low-definition space full of possibilities, designed to stimulate our orienting response - our instinctive visual response to novel stimulus, a built in sensitivity to potential predatory threats.

Credits

Design Team: Michael Trudgeon, David Poulton [studio dp], Anthony Kitchener [engineering consultant], Crowd Productions Contract administration
Visualisation and documentation: Glynis Nott

The client for the Screen Lounge project was the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square, Melbourne Australia.

The Hyperhouse research program formed the basis for the design and fabrication response by Crowd Productions and studio dp. This program is conducted in conjunction with Anthony Kitchener from Cash Engineering Research and is ongoing.

Fabrication and product development team

Tensile engineering: Tensys Engineers
Machining: Tool Time engineering
Fabrication: David Poulton, Alexander Saunders