Baking Soda
Commissioned Installation, The Ion District, Houston, Texas, 2024
At the Ion Building in Houston, Hillerbrand+Magsamen present an installation that explores the transformative beauty and potential inherent in the everyday. "Baking Soda" examines the poetic interplay between domestic life and creative experimentation, celebrating the magic found in ordinary objects and materials sourced directly from their own home. Drawing inspiration from home science experiments, the artists use toys, measuring cups, insulation foam, lights, and kitchen utensils as building blocks for a playful yet profound investigation into the unseen connections between the mundane and the extraordinary.
Using their house as a laboratory for exploration, the artists engage with the materials and objects of daily life, transforming them into an evolving narrative of discovery. AI is occasionally employed as a creative tool in this process, extending the experimentation into the digital realm. This installation incorporates objects, photographs, and video, inviting viewers to pause and reconsider the materials that shape their lives. Through shifts in scale, context, and medium, "Baking Soda" transforms kitchen staples into a meditation on the larger journey of life, revealing the ways we construct meaning from everyday transitions.
Baking Soda consists of four windows:
The first window displays a large five-foot-diameter mobile made from found objects. As it spins within the space, it is illuminated by a shifting color wheel reminiscent of a 1950s Christmas tree light, transforming the objects into integrated shadows and patterns.
The second window contains three large-scale flat video monitors. Viewers begin to notice that these monitors display a live feed connected to the third window of the installation. Small robotic devices move, click, and rotate on the screens. Things turn on and off, activating as if they have a life of their own in the third window, while the monitors stand like silent guardians—observing, but not participating.
The third and largest window of the installation contains an overwhelming variety of materials. It resembles a kitchen table where a science experiment has gone awry. There are alternative photographic materials, found objects, motorized components, pinwheels blown by fans on timers, light boxes that turn on and off, rotating pedestals, and trash bags inflating and deflating. The window feels like a mad scientist’s experiment spiraling out of control.
The final window is an encapsulated blue plexiglass box filled with white ping-pong balls. Intermittently, as viewers pass by, a powerful fan is triggered, sending the ping-pong balls bouncing around the box in a chaotic flurry—like vinegar and baking soda reacting in an explosion of sound, light, and visuals.
The Ion District, Ion Innovation District, or Rice Innovation District, is a technology park and innovation district in Midtown Houston which was established as a joint initiative between Rice University and the City of Houston. It has also been called the South Main Innovation District.
