An interactive art exhibit designed to encourage play, creativity and connection will open in the heart of Iowa’s capital city this weekend.
Renae Mauk, vice president of downtown development at the Greater Des Moines Partnership, says the installation called “Domino Effect” will bring color, music and larger-than-life game pieces to the Cowles Commons area, across from the Des Moines Civic Center.
“They’re giant oversized dominoes set up in a few different stations and folks will be able to come down and actually help topple them over. They’ll pop back up as they fall over,” Mauk says. “All the different stations make different musical notes, different sounds. They light up and have a really nice glow.”
Through lights and sounds, she says the installation creates an evolving experience. When the dominoes fall, they’ll make musical notes from some familiar instruments like the flute, but also from other instruments many Iowans have likely never heard of before.
“I was learning about new instruments myself, the balafon, percussion, vocals, flute — like I said,” Mauk says. “So as people are interacting with different stations, it’ll all come together and every visit to Cowles Commons will make a unique musical concert.”
Domino Effect was created in Montreal, Canada, and has been touring the U.S., with recent stops in Denver and New York City. This is its only Iowa stop. There are 12 sets of the giant dominoes, each set contains ten dominoes, and the sets can be linked together in different configurations.
“They’ll be spread out so people have plenty of space to come up to them and run around still and enjoy,” Mauk says. “It’ll be fun for people to interact with them in the daytime, but also coming back at nighttime as well and even in the early morning, so, we’re really excited about this.”
The exhibit will be installed Friday and it opens to the public on Saturday. It will be in place through September 30th.