GOD:TEMPO at WNDR Museum

EFFIXX Studio’s Anthony Ciannamea drew inspiration from his music-centred childhood to make a powerfully personal meditation on time for WNDR Museum.

Last year, the team behind the brand new WNDR Museum approached EFFIXX Studio to develop an immersive experience for their new San Diego location. WNDR Museum Creative Director David Allen gave EFFIXX’s Anthony Ciannamea carte blanche to create work prioritising Ciannamea’s interests and passions. Before the event, EFFIXX knew only that attendees could enter and exit the room freely; in other words, they had just a brief moment to capture people’s imaginations.

With this project, dubbed GOD:TEMPO, Ciannamea wanted to return to his roots in playing music and experimenting with sound in his youth. He wanted to prioritise sound and allow structure, composition, and texture to be the leading force behind the visuals. The EFFIXX team set out to build and exhibit a clock scaling the size of a totally isolated room wherein the audience would be invited to participate in a ritual meditation on the passage of time.

For their visual design, the creative team took inspiration from the repetitive mechanical elements of clock faces. They combined the rhythm and texture of a ticking seconds hand with musical interludes demarcating measurements of time. Ciannamea established a time-based grid system and designed the blueprint for the architecture: a simple hall of portals modelled in Cinema 4D and imported into Notch.

From there, the team linked Notch and Ableton Live and fleshed out discrete intervals of time making up each of the project’s four chapters. Back in Notch, they created rough lighting and blocked out elements to the sound of their looping audio, allowing them to shape motion logic and tweak the sound design as the visual elements played out.