By Amy Sachs
Correspondent
It’s time once again to begin choosing classes, going to advising sessions and generally thinking about the future. This week’s Brown Bag Series speaker, Michael Schneider, showed students and faculty just what can happen when loves and interests are pursued.
Schneider began his undergraduate education at Pomona College, in Los Angeles as a pre-med major. However, he soon found himself in the art department, and before he knew it, he was teaching art to inner city kids in L.A. Since then, Schneider has been all over the world, and experienced things most people can only dream of.
“Because he followed his interests he is in a field to create an experience for others,” said professor Chris Ault, a former colleague of Schneider’s at New York University.
The main focus of Schneider’s presentation was his latest, and biggest project — The Dream Cube. Located in Shanghai, China, The Dream Cube is the world’s biggest art expo, with an estimated 1.5 million visitors per day, with 70 to 100 million having seen the exposition in the past couple of months. However, the Cube doesn’t get much world recognition, and 98 percent of the visitors have been Chinese.
The Dream Cube was designed to be The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, the theme being “better city better life” in an attempt to improve the city.
It was built as a giant box made mostly of LED tubes.
“The form of the building is kind of floating within the space,” Schneider said of the building. The entire building is interactive, with clapping changing the colors of lights and colors, and walls covered in LED panels showing different seasons and images.
There are five main stages to the Dream Cube — the queue, the transition, the stroll, the theatre and the exit. The queue is underneath the building, getting guests ready to go into the Cube, with mist spraying them since “Shanghai is one of the most miserably hot cities in the world,” Schneider said.
The Cube also features a giant interactive theater, made of over 30,000 pixels, and elevators featuring 103 inch plasma screens.
Schneider describes the Dream Cube as the “dream project” because it brought together all of his random pieces of education as he worked it.
