Hello, World

A collaborative, community-based installation

This mixed media installation is a visual meditation on the constant, yet ever-changing sky above us. It was inspired by the place where it now hangs in Fremont, California — a place that, upon first visiting felt like both nowhere or everywhere.

The sky can anchor us to local geography or transport us to faraway, unfamiliar places. It’s something all inhabitants of this planet universally share and yet each have a unique view of — and so became the perfect metaphor to act as a welcome sign and gentle reminder that we are all neighbors.

Lobby of Meta office in Fremont with hightop tables and chairs in front of a wall of corrugated aluminum painted with the word Hello and parly coverd with pixelated cloud shapes of images of clouds
Designer Scott Boms in front of a wall of corrugated aluminum painted with the word Hello and parly coverd with pixelated cloud shapes of images of clouds
A wall of corrugated aluminum painted with the word Hello and parly coverd with pixelated cloud shapes of images of clouds
Close up of painted corrugated aluminum and pixelated cloud images printed on cut acrylic panels
Close up of painted corrugated aluminum and pixelated cloud images printed on cut acrylic panels
A wall of corrugated aluminum painted with the word Hello and parly coverd with pixelated cloud shapes of images of clouds
Overhead view of a Polaroid Lab printer and black darkslide on a green and yellow cutting mat
Overhead view of two cardboard boxes full of white frame Polaroid photographs
Photo icon

657

Photographs

Map icon

3

Continents

Flag icon

12

Countries

City icon

92

Cities

The original design of the project involved utilizing the Polaroid Lab printer to take the hundreds of contributed digital photographs from Meta employees and transform them back into an analog form. Unfortunately, and despite pre-production successes, I wasn’t able to yield a suitable balance of image and color fidelity through this method.

After many hours of experimentation, the final look and feel was more important than the nuance of the production medium, and so composing the imagery to print onto vinyl adhered to cut acrylic panels was chosen as a suitable fallback and in the end reduced final production costs by nearly two-thirds.