This installation is part of an immersive experience in my new exhibit Brick Planet, which premiered in Las Vegas in May 2025. Accompanied by swooshing blue light effects and the deep sound of ambient underwater gurgles, the piece consists of 40 fish, swooshing dramatically overhead in a giant curve all around you.
The installation
This piece is part of my traveling exhibit Brick Planet. Built with millions of LEGO bricks, Brick Planet features immersive rooms that simulate environments all around the world complete with over 100 of my sculptures, lots of interactive hands-on activities, and real science education.
Created with 23,880 LEGO pieces, the installation measures over 12 feet wide and 10 feet tall.
Creating it
The challenge for a project like this is not designing it or building it — it’s designing the setup process. Creating the fish would be easy enough, and even figuring out how to hang them wouldn’t be too hard. But these travel from city-to-city in my exhibition … so how do you ensure that each fish can be precisely hung into position by the exhibit installers at every city. And how do you pack and transport something like that?
I created all 40 copies of the fish in parallel in my studio in Amsterdam in late 2023. Each fish is nearly a foot long (26cm) and built with 597 LEGO pieces. The 40 fish, in all, used 23,880 LEGO bricks.
Then, in 2024 they were shipped to the USA where I staged the display and positioned every fish exactly the way I wanted. Working together with my exhibition partners at Imagine, we devised a hardware hanging system where each fish could be retracted upwards to the steel frame for crating and shipment, then quickly and easily lowered to its precise position, rotation, and angle.
Finally in 2025 the sculptures were crated together with the hanging system, shipped to Las Vegas, and installed for the first time at the world-premiere of the exhibit.
Watch a time-lapse (45 seconds) of the fish being lowered into position:
Accompanied by ambient burbling underwater sounds and swishy blue light-effects, the sculpture really comes alive!
I’m incredibly happy with how it came out, and I hear a lot of gasps as people enter the room. You can’t ask for more than that! 😊
