Get Electrified With This Comic-Inspired Installation

Hundreds of cities across the globe host their own comic con, an annual convention that draws crowds of comic-book and pop-culture enthusiasts. For this year’s Salón del Cómic de València in Spain last March, the city council engaged local firm Clap Studio to create a bespoke activity space that could be easily disassembled for reuse. Clap cofounders Jordi Iranzo and Àngela Montagud responded with Cloud, a knock-out installation that recalls something between a superhero comic strip and a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

“We used the flat, primary colors of comic culture,” Iranzo explains of the canary-yellow and cobalt-blue paint coating Cloud’s plywood elements, which encompass 15 stools serving 15 CNC-cut recesses around a nearly 12-foot-diameter table, used for talks and workshops. The table’s spiky form is modeled after the action bubbles that appear in cartoons—think “zap!” or “pow!”—“the kind used to communicate sounds and make emotions visible,” Montagud adds.

But the table could also be interpreted as a bright sun, especially with the LED-lit partition surrounding it, its rounded, cloud-like trim also cut by CNC. Though it’s meant as a separator from the rest of the hall, portions of it are only 5 feet high, allowing the curious a peek at what’s happening within.