The Living Surface, Omer Yosef, Founder, Coherent Sense
The Living Surface
From Public Sculpture to Convergent Systems in the Built Environment
What does it look like when a building element consumes its environment and grows?
Omer Yosef founded Coherent Sense to explore the question, working alongside architecture teams to discover where art, energy, living systems, and intelligence converge in a single design decision. His path to this work was lateral: from UCLA fine art and large-scale stage design to data-driven public art and intelligent multimedia environments. That trajectory, shaped by Svetlana Boym's off-modern thinking and object-oriented ontology, produced what he calls the metabolic object, a surface that feeds on its environment, generates energy, and evolves.
The talk dives into Strata, a public art sculpture at Mesa City Hall inspired by the geologic deep time spiral that translates the city's environmental data into real-time video art, and the Usona Institute, a wellness center where spatial audio, volumetric light, and an emotional valence interface are calibrated to the human nervous system.
Yosef details how training across art, music, and experiential design reveals convergences that conventional building disciplines weren't structured to find, and what becomes possible when these systems stop being specified in silos and start performing together.
About our Speaker
Omer Yosef (Founding Partner Coherent Sense) explores how the legacies of craft can coexist with the systems of a new technological age. His practice investigates cities as rich tapestries of semiotics full of contemporary ritual disguised as social experience. Using traditional, parametric, and new media site-specific material expression, he aims to help turn the everyday into a site of wonder and shared identity.
Through the interplay of art frameworks and design-build systems, Omer’s work acts as a cultural translation, enchanting contemporary spaces and affirming the role of beauty in shaping our collective consciousness.
About Futurespaces
Founded and led by Josh Goldblum (Bluecadet) Futurespaces offers live webinars and in-person tours that provide valuable insights into the creative process of creating contemporary experiences.