The first installation travelers encounter is a glowing blend of bamboo, lace, light, and geometry created by Professor Lisa Marks, Interim Chair of Georgia Tech’s new School of Arts, Entertainment, and Creative Technologies, whose work merges endangered handcraft traditions with algorithmic modeling.

For Marks, exhibiting in the airport’s international terminal is about reaching an audience that rarely sees contemporary craft or computational design up close.

“I think this is maybe more important than going to a gallery where it might only be seen by 70 or 80 people,” she said. “Here, it will be seen by people of all different ages and nationalities… I’m really excited to have a presence for such an international group.”

Her installation features two intertwined projects:

• Knit Bamboo — “bamboo veneer and some algorithmic modeling to morph the rows into different shapes to create different types of objects.”

• Parametric Lace — “traditional tools and techniques to make lace, but mixed into different algorithm patterns or three-dimensional lace using algorithmic modeling.”

She hopes travelers sense the relationship between the familiar and the future.

“I hope they notice the geometry and the sense of the traditional tools and techniques,” she said. “Maybe they recognize the knitting or lace making from their own objects or their own history… but that it’s used in a really different way, with different materials or different scales or patterns to create something new.”

The installation came with logistical quirks typical of working inside an airport.

“Getting the light panel to work… so it looks like window blinds in front of sunlight—that took a little bit of enabling,” she said. Drilling into airport walls also required precision, but “the art handlers here at the airport helped out, and it was not that big a deal.”

For Marks, blending handcraft and computation is a way of protecting art forms that might otherwise disappear.

“It really looks at what we’re good at as humans, and what hands are good at making, and then what computers are really good at,” she explained. “I’m looking at different ways that we interpret crafts that are in danger of fading away… and how we can use technology to combine with handcraft to create new objects, to keep the craft relevant, appreciated, and continuing.”

And what she loved most?

“When you see it all come together,” she said. “Everything looks the way that you imagined it, and you can imagine people walking by.”

“We’re setting here an exhibition that shows the first robotic musician we developed. It’s called Haile,” said Professor Gil Weinberg, founder of the Robotic Musicianship Lab. “We also have pictures and videos of a bunch of other robotic musicians we developed over the last 20 years.”

Haile was one of the first robots to create a truly acoustic percussion experience—no speakers, no playback. Just listening, improvising, and drumming like a collaborator.

“It will be awesome for all airport visitors to understand more what we’re trying to do in bringing music, design, computation, AI together to create artistic experiences,” Weinberg said.

Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Amit Rogel helped build and program several of the robot systems on display.

“When you walk in here, you’re gonna first see Haile… Then we have this awesome video… and this cool little sound dome where you stand under it,” Rogel said. “Not only can you see our robots, but you also hear the music that they produce.”

The robot exhibit features work from:

• Medus.ai, a multiple-arm percussion installation

• Shimon, a marimba-playing robot capable of improvisation

• Forest, a set of dancing robot arms developed as Rogel’s master’s thesis

“We have four cargo bikes that have speakers mounted and computers, and they’re all operating in one network,” said Professor Henrik von Coler. “You can ride them, or you can just put them up for installation somewhere.”

The project began as a roaming sound instrument designed by students using hardware, software, and aesthetic concepts developed across Georgia Tech’s music and industrial design programs.

“It was pretty hard… effectively managing the timing to get everything fabricated and mounted and working,” said Music Technology student Laura Call Gomez.

“One of the goals is that people… can roll up to a park or a tunnel… pull out whatever instruments they want, and start making music instantly,” said undergrad student Jacob Westerstahl.

“Plastic Reimagined really aligns with our mission,” said Everett Long, interim executive director of Atlanta Contemporary—where the recycled-plastic chairs first debuted earlier this year. “It presents cutting-edge work from emerging artists in innovative ways that address contemporary issues.” Visitors, he added, “didn’t think of chairs as art.” Yet the installation took them through “a full array of responses and sometimes emotions.”

At the airport, the project expands with deeper context from its creator, Assistant Professor Hyojin Kwon, whose graduate design research studio at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture began with a deceptively simple question: What if plastic could become a civic material?

“Plastic Reimagined is a graduate design research studio… it explores how plastic can be more viable as an expressive architectural medium,” Kwon said. “We sourced plastics from campus waste streams as well as from local recyclers and NGOs, and students processed these plastics so they could be ground, reprocessed, and reconstituted into more architectural materials.”

The work is not just about repurposing plastic—it’s about rethinking the entire system around it.

Her students used hybrid fabrication methods that merge analog craft with computational workflows.

“This translating involved a lot of different methodologies, tools, and technologies… every student took a different approach, hybridizing low-tech hands-on processes with more cutting-edge fabrication and production tools,” she explained. The result is a collection of chairs that reveal both the possibilities and the resistance of recycled plastic.

“Plastic works and resists. It’s not an easy material… you really need to understand its behaviors or properties. But we embraced the unexpected resistance as a design language.”

Each chair, with its ripples, seams, or uneven surfaces, holds the memory of the material’s former life—post-consumer waste transformed into color, texture, and structural form.

Beyond aesthetics, Kwon emphasizes the project’s civic dimension.

“The students engaged the idea of sustainability not as a superficial slogan, but as local actionability,” she said. “We worked closely with partners and communities involved in the circular system of plastic waste. By getting more literacy into this system, we contributed to a more circular economy.”

For Kwon, exhibiting the work in the airport is especially meaningful.

“These post-consumer materials were coming from our campus—our students’ everyday life. By repurposing them, we created meaningful research outcomes. Showing this beyond our academic setup invites the larger community into dialogue.”

And she hopes travelers pause long enough to notice what’s hidden in plain sight.

“I hope they’re intrigued by how it appears—the aesthetics, the colors—and that by reading the statements, they engage in this dialogue about sustainability and the circular economy,” she said. “Our efforts are to facilitate conversations about the recycling of plastic and its impacts.”

Ultimately, Plastic Reimagined showcases the School of Architecture’s role in shaping public perspectives on design, waste, and material futures.

“Atlanta has long been a home of future technological inventors and innovators,” Kolodkin said. “We’re hoping travelers who come across this exhibition will get the same sense of wonder and awe that we did when we first saw these pieces.”

As millions pass through the terminal, Transport Transform Transcend offers a rare story that’s at once local and global—robotics and recycled plastic, sound art and computational lace, all converging in the city’s busiest crossroads.

For the rest of us, it offers something simple and unexpected: a chance, between flights, to stop, listen, sit down, and imagine a different future.