A Poetics of Systems: Danielle Roney's Expansive Sculpture and Media Practice
Danielle Roney's work gives form to the systems that connect us. Over two decades she has built an expansive international practice across sculpture and digital media, anchoring major medical research centers, global tech headquarters, and airports, while maintaining a practice of critical dialogue within museum environments. Each piece draws us into poetic relation with one another, the world, and how we navigate our place within it.
Maris (2025)
MSC Cruise Terminal AA/AAA, PortMiami. Courtesy of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Art in Public Places Trust. Photo Credit: Danielle Roney Studio
Maris is a real-time, generative "living" virtual world of animated marine habitats, shaped by live NOAA ocean data, installed permanently at the MSC Cruise Terminal at PortMiami. The data does not simply represent the ocean; it acts, reshapes, carries consequence. The largest generative real-time projection mapping installation of its kind in North America, Maris’s custom platform populates 165 million pixels of 3D oceanic animation across the terminal façade.
Transforming the architecture into communicative infrastructure, where habitats express their distressed conditions in real-time, the project offers a new model for public art at the intersection of climate, data, and culture.
THE CONSTELLATIONS: Pegasus and The Herdsman – Boötes (2025)
Denver International Airport, Concourse C. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Denver International Airport, The City and County of Denver
At Denver International Airport, The Constellations (2025) suspends two sculptural satellites based on the constellations above Denver's winter and summer solstice skies. Locating the airport's personal universe, each LED star is positioned by its light-year distance from Earth. Studio advances in curvilinear structure and precision fabrication interweave the computational with the handmade. Throughout, the work is grounded in the natural and social ecologies of place.
Systems of Uncertainty (2026)
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Photo Credit: Danielle Roney Studio
Inaugurating the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia's new building, Systems of Uncertainty: Prototype v15 introduces a new mediated sculptural system built from a fixed set of modular curves and interchangeable visual programming. Designed to be iteratively reformed over time, Roney extends her established practice of creating portals of presence, drawing on a lineage in which light and animation have carried geospatial histories and participant vocal data to illuminate how communities occupy institutional spaces. Redefining the technologies and structures we build today, the work offers a vision of resilience: — fixed parts, open futures, and the ongoing work of finding, site by site and iteration by iteration, what better looks like from here.
