Look up first. Todd Moyer’s Medusa
A chandelier of red light over the Portland entry, by a man who built his first light show in eighth grade.
Medusa hangs where Hopscotch Portland begins: looping red light sprawled across the ceiling, every tendril going its own way at once. Most people walk under it looking for the front desk. Look up first. It earns the name. One look and it freezes you where you stand.
The eighth-grade disco room
Todd Moyer has been working where art meets technology for about thirty years. The origin story is a shop class project, a home stereo and a string of Christmas lights, combined in eighth grade into a disco room. Everything since has been that impulse at larger scale: take a technology and turn it into something a person can feel. Before his studio, he spent a decade at NextEngine helping bring the first desktop 3D scanner to market. He now runs 11 Dimensions with his partner Rocio Zarate, out of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Look up first. Check in second.
He is all over this building
Medusa is the one you walk under. In the Lounge, his tubes of color run overhead and never sit still, which is why the Portland bar feels like a room in the gallery rather than a place next to it. In San Antonio, his Laser Graffiti hands you a can that sprays light instead of paint, and the wall drips in real time. Three very different rooms, one maker, one idea: light you can stand inside.
The film above was shot on a phone from directly underneath, the way most people end up seeing it. That is the right way to look at it.
