radarboy

Playing homage to James Turrell, ITP student Matthew Richard has built this pretty sweet kinetic light sculpture, an area of work that I am really interested in. 80 RGB LEDs create a animated color field painting by letting the light itself mix together on a canvas. The 2 LEDs are placed at the tips of 40 arms that are arranged in a circle and controlled by 40 servos. One LED faces towards the center of the circle and the other faces away from the center. Subtle differences in servo timing and LED values create color patterns resemble wasting sunsets and sunrises melding and disappearing.

Said Richard: “I wanted to create a living color field painting using a mechanical interface instead of a projector.”

Here’s a documentation video:

Via Rhizome.

I’ve always been fascinated by the flickering light a TV gives off. I am also concerned with my art being experiential – to create a place for visitors to interact with, hang out and make their own. Thus the idea of The Living Room was born.

A TV remote control could be used to control the “channels” on the TV and hence the lighting of the room. The channels were actually various sound reactive applications running off a laptop. The computer was connected to an Arduino with an infra-red sensor to communicated with the remote control.

Featured was also a knitting channel which showed visitors how to knit, with wool and knitting needles provided.

The installation was part of the Mind The Box launch event held at the amazing Mind Pirates building in Kreuzberg Berlin.

During Transmediale a few weeks ago, Berlin had an awesome lazer rainbow over the city.

The installation entitled From One To Many, was created by American and Berlin artist Yvette Mattern.

Read more about it here: http://www.transmediale.de/en/from-one-to-many-en

A beautiful minimal instillation by Japanese design studio Curiosity. Ping pong balls magically float in the air, suspended by jets of hot air, at variably lighted. Very nice indeed.

Says curiosity: “The installation is designed based on the idea of design freed from information, history and reference, a place of preserved time and apparent emptiness.

Design is about communication, the challenge of ‘Light-Light’ is to create a connection with a minimum of means. this language should transcend age, culture, history and genre using technology but make it disappear, enclosed in a space that would ultimatly vanish.

“Light-Light” gives the freedom to the visitor to be part of the installation as actor, able to interact, play, brake and recreate. it projects your own desire and dream into a vision where everything seems possible. ‘Light-Light’ is a place of discovery each individual create its own history when encounter the installation, from surprise to curiosity, from impact to intimacy. ‘Light-Light’ is a design liberated from shape and materiality only the experience remains.”

Check the video here:

Here’s a good idea of how it works, even if you don’t speak Japanese:

Check out Curiosity’s site for lots of other amazing stuff here.

It’s nice to see projection mapping moving into a more conceptual realm. Here’s some really nice work from Kit Webster:

“Enigmatica is a work in progress exploring new concepts in combining light, sound and space to create multi-dimensional synesthetic environments. The work experiments with spatial segmentation, illusory oddities and aural expression, freely shifting from order to disconnection and sweeping through the spectrum of colours from softly subtle to psychedelic. By constantly reforming the dynamics within the space, the installation demonstrates the potential for creating new forms of digital sculpture.”

http://kitwebster.com.au

Just discovered Israeli artist Yochai Matmos who has done some fun and interesting work with light (and glitter!!!).

http://www.yochaimatos.com/

I love this simple and beautiful light art intervention by Luzinterruptus.

“We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.

Thus, an urban space conventionally reserved for speed, pollution and noise, for a few hours will become a place of peacefulness, relaxation and coexistence. Illuminated by a soft, diffuse light which makes us feel comfortable, in a pleasant environment, in spite of the chaos which surrounds us. ”

Read more about the project here.

Groundbreaking computer animator Richard “Dr” Baily was a leader in particle based computer animations. He worked on movies such as Tron, Superman Returns, Blade and The Matrix, but he is probably best known for the beautiful animations for the movie Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.

Bailey referred to what he did as “Sculpting with Light”, rather than animation, something that really resonated with me.

Bailey produced over 60,000 frames of atmospheric planet animation using his own particle system – called SPORE – developed in C++. You can see a few of the planet animations here in the trailer:

Of SPORE Bailey, commented: “[It's] a system that’s sort of a continuum between order and chaos. Some images reside firmly in the world of order, with the particles animated in a fairly straightforward way. Other images that look really twitchy and electric reside in the world of chaos.

Ultimately, the goal was to build a living system that will breed and evolve designs and animations that I would never have dreamed of, and could not produce by any other means.”

Bailey died in 2006. See more of his work at http://www.imagesavant.com

Director Rogier van der Zwaag uses wooden blocks and light to create this amazing stop motion video for the band Nobody Beats The Drum. Not mad about the tune. But the video is super inspiring.

And here’s a quite sweet “Making of” video:

See more work from van der Zwaag at www.100procenthalal.nl

Anthony McCall was a pioneer of light projection in the 1970s. With the current upsurge in interest in light art, there’s a renewed interest in his work. I think what I love most about his stuff, is that his a lot of his works are experiential – based on projecting simple vector lines, the emphasis placed not on the final destination but rather the journey the light takes to get there. The kind of feeling/experience you get when playing in a lazer.

The sound is pretty bad on this one, so crank up the volume. Anthony McCall: talking about his beautiful Between You and I installation:

Here McCall talks about his “Line Describing a Cone” piece:

Visit his site here: http://www.anthonymccall.com

Binary Waves is a kinetic sculpture that analyses flows of movement in it’s environment – both electromagnetic and physical. The project was developed by Lab[au]

Binary Waves by LAb[au] from The Nonsense Society on Vimeo.

The project reminded me of another great work by Ryota Kuwakubo called Atmos where a field of lights reacted to air movement – creating a light pattern of wind movement.

Unfortunately, it’s quite an old project, so not much information floating around the interweb on it. Would love to see him resurrect it.

I’ve decided to start release some of the stuff I’ve been working on lately, building up towards my show. I have so many experiments sitting on my hard drive that never see the light of day.

So here we have Sound Reactive Circle 1.

I wanted it to be able to play in the browser, but for some reason couldn’t get it to work, event though I signed the applet. Next time….

A video is here. For more of my work see the radarboy FLickr page.

Here’s the code. Build in Processing. It includes a Mac, PC and Linux application.