Watch this: mechanical ceiling mimics the feeling of being underwater

The surface of a lake or river is an iconic part of the natural world, but a mechanical version has its own kind of beauty. For his installation Underwater, artist David Bowen mapped real-time wave patterns by putting a Kinect above the water and setting it to capture the water’s surface as a plane. That information was then sent to hundreds of motors, which controlled the web above. The result, shown last month at Interieur 2012 in Belgium, is a rippling ceiling that captures the feeling of looking up while being underwater. Bowen’s work often focuses on the disconnect between nature and machines, but he says he’s increasingly finding that “maybe that contrast is not necessarily as black and white as we might perceive.”