Sculptor Uses iPhone to Control 40-Foot Woman

(light music)

My name is Marco Cochrane.

And I'm a sculptor and we're in my studio

here on Treasure Island.

(light music)

I moved to Treasure Island to get a larger space

because I was gonna do a 40 foot figure.

And this building has high enough ceilings

not to scale the piece up, but to work in scale.

I used the pantograph that was invented in 1602

and still works very accurately.

I used to do enlargements of sculpture

the old-fashioned way before computers took over.

Now, computers do it.

There's a new technology the Autodesk has got

that's set up and it's called Photofly.

And you take photographs of a three-dimensional object,

all around it, and email them to them,

and they send you back a pretty

high-res 3D scan of the thing.

That changes the game completely, for me anyway,

because I have wanted to do...

I work in clay and there's areas where the

piece is beautiful during the process.

And back before this,

I'd have to stop, make a mold of the piece,

destroy it, basically, by doing that,

fix it, start again.

And sometimes it's only 20 minutes

later that I want to do it again.

So I've been waiting all this time

to be able to just photograph it

and then keep going.

(upbeat music)

The lighting system for Bliss is

LEDs, addressable LEDs,

so they're controlled by computer.

And we have...

At Burning Man, we had an iPad application

that you can run the lights.

And now we just came out with a iPhone

application to go out there and change the lights,

make the lights do their thing on your iPhone.

You can pick colors and paint the internal

and then these are the external lights.

So you can change the color of the external lights.

Since it's empty, you can light it internally

and you can light it externally.

And if it's only externally, it looks solid.

It's like a solid metal thing.

And if you light it internally,

you can see through it and you backlight it,

you can see right through it.

It's practically not there.

But if you mix the external light and the internal light,

it's crazy.

The scale of it...

I had a sense of what it would do.

Being that big would overwhelm the conscious brain and

throw you into a different state.

And it does.

It kind of trips you out, like you can't

figure out how big it is or how big you are.

And it lets that feeling in of

real serious contentment and joy.

And that's what the world needs.

(upbeat techno music)