LAUREN SCHROEDER

I was interested in exploring heating and cooling systems, and the way energy and temperature move through both natural and human-made systems. I think part of that came from seeing data centers and their enormous cooling needs in the news so much lately, and from thinking about how central cooling is to life in Austin. We live with intense heat, but we're also surrounded by bodies of water that help regulate temperature.

I became interested in that relationship between infrastructure, nature, and temperature. These different systems we build and depend on to keep things from getting too hot.

I was heavily influenced by the building's history. The Seaholm Intake Facility was built as a pump house to draw water from the river to help cool the power plant. Water would circulate through the plant's systems to help keep electricity generation efficient.

I became interested in this idea of cooling as an invisible system that we depend on, and started imagining it from the perspective of the water and aquatic creatures. What would it be like to inhabit a system designed to move heat away? What might be happening inside all of those pipes and structures?

That led me to create a surreal cooling system that is part factory, part living organism. I imagined the Seaholm building as a giant aquarium that is heated by the sun, cooled by water being piped through the building, and inhabited by an underwater creature.

In Cool Vein, as the sun heats the water, an underwater creature leads a pipe through the building to help cool it back down. The creature becomes almost like an operator of this strange cooling infrastructure.

I really enjoyed imagining a pipe twisting through the architecture, so I built the entire scene in Blender and simulated it in 3D space. I then exported the scene as a 2D video designed specifically to be projected onto the building.

The building's large doors and windows became like windows into this watery environment. They also became places where the pipe could twist in and out of the architecture, making the projection feel less like an image on the building and more like something moving through it.

I hope the piece brings the building to life in a surreal and playful way, while giving a simple visual representation of the systems we use to move heat and keep things cool.