August 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Man With No Shadow
Beam me up, Scotty! Artist Makoto Tojiki transforms a 3D LED grid into a pixel person reminiscent of the Star Trek teleportation machine. Titled “Man With No Shadow,” Tojiki’s LED man was exhibited at the Salone Satellite event in Italy in 2009. Here’s a poetic quote from Tojiki about his work - “An object is seen when our eyes capture light that is reflected from the...
3 tags
Bloon
Book a Bloon! Yup, you can make a reservation now to get one of the first spots on a Bloon flight (sometime between 2013-2015). What’s a Bloon you ask? It’s a $150,000+ private adventure in a balloon that can take you to the edge of space being developed by Zero2infinity. Bloon’s objective is to advance human experience beyond its current limits, by allowing you to see the most...
3 tags
Watermarks Project
Here’s another great example of an artist using light to bring public awareness to an environmental issue. Chris Bodle, UK artist and architect, uses projected light on sides of buildings to show how high water levels could potential rise and dramatically affect cities near water in his Watermarks Project. Bodle’s work is influenced by climate change and warns of its increasing force...
March 2010
13 posts
3 tags
Memory Cloud
Memory Cloud is based on smoke signals, one of the oldest forms of visual communication dating back over 5,000 years. Created by Minimaforms, an experiential architecture and design team, Memory Cloud transformed London’s Trafalgar Square into an ambient and responsive environment by provoking an ancient form of communication and using it to facilitate a modern adaptation. The project explores the...
2 tags
Ocean of Light
Ocean of Light, a project by digital arts group Squidsoup, explore the immersive possibilities of individually addressed points of light set in a matrix. The points are choreographed to simulate movement in physical space. The materials respond to nearby noises by creating ripples across its surface and luminous firework-like blasts. Invisible ‘agents’ in the room navigate the...
4 tags
Odaiba Water Show
Every year, the annual Odaiba water illumination show in Tokyo, projects an hourly 15-minute slide show depicting the birth of the Earth on a 15-meter-tall and 40-meter-wide fan-shaped water screen. The 15-minute show lasts for three weeks at the end of the year to attract holiday shoppers to the nearby shopping center, located off the shore of the Odaiba Seaside Park. The technology that makes...
4 tags
Atom
In a darkened room a matrix of 64 moving, helium-filled balloons each containing a bright whit LED floats in space like the atoms of a molecule. This collaborative piece titlted Atom has been performed by visual artist Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at Tesla Berlin, and at several other festivals in 2007 and 2009. The weightless objects represent three-dimensional...
3 tags
Flyfire
Imagine the pixels of your computer screen breaking away and surrounding you in a brilliant swarm of three-dimensional digital information and imagery? This is exactly what the project Flyfire, imagined by researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and ARES Lab, attempts to achieve. Flyfire uses remote controlled, self-organizing, choreographed “mini helicopters.” Each helicopter contains small LEDs...
3 tags
LightArt Kijkduin
Illuminated glass globes of different colors and sizes, measuring between 20 and 40 inches in diameter, are spread along the dunes and natural elements of Kijkduin, the southern beach resort of The Hague, Netherlands for the LightArt Kijkduin Biennial. The orbs of light constantly change their colors after the sun sets in the evening. Even during the daytime, when the lights are not lit, the white...
4 tags
Happy Clouds
28-year old London artist Stuart Semple has made lighter-than-air foam smiley faces using a flogo machine. A flogo machine, invented by two special effects inventors in the 1990s, uses glycerin, food dye, and helium, and extrudes the resulting mixture through a die to create floating logos. Semple has used this technology to release one pink-tinted happy face cloud every 7 seconds near the Tate...
2 tags
FogScreen
Fogscreen promises a “walk-through” branding experience and new medium for advertisers to captivate and fascinate audiences. It’s a screen that blasts microscopic fog droplets made from tap water, ultrasonic waves, and patented technology developed by virtual reality researchers. This curtain of “dry” fog serves as a translucent projection screen for displaying messages,...
3 tags
Character
Companies go under, their stores close, and their signs and logos are taken down and demolished. “These pieces of typography are all unique design objects, why should they be demolished,” says Aleksi Hautamäki, founder of the Finnish company called Character, which recycles unused signage. “We choose the letters that have character, take them, replace the old neon tubes with LED’s, check that they...
3 tags
Equanimity
Chris Levine describes his project “Equanimity” as visual echoes. His sensorial and experiential piece projects imagery onto the viewers’ peripheral vision using an unnerving imaging technique he pioneered. In this work, his historic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II appears in an instant only to disappear when you look directly at the 6’-6” vertical strip of oscillating LEDs. Chris uses light as a...
3 tags
Capacitive Body
The installation “capacitive body” is a modular light system of electroluminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and microcontroller. The system reacts to unnatural, low frequency, inaudible sound disruptions in the environment, like the rumble of car traffic. The vibrations of the architecture trigger the wire to pulse in bursts of violent light flashes. Increasing vibrations...
4 tags
Air de Paris
In Paris’s Parc Andre Citroen, a 12-story tall, 72 feet diameter balloon floats permanently 500 feet above the ground. The balloon titled “Air de Paris Balloon” monitors the quantity of the most harmful air contaminants and particles found in the atmosphere, and relays this information back to the city by using an easy-to-understand color coded illumination. Visible from over 12...
4 tags
Green Cloud
In a time when environmental responsibility is of urgent concern, French art duo HeHe(Helen Evans and Heiki Hansen) broadcast an eco-awareness message in the sky by illuminating a smokestack’s emissions with laser light. This project titled Nuage Vert, or “Green Cloud”, uses laser tracking to shift and outline the vapors from a smokestack at a power plant in Helsinki. The concept was to...
January 2010
9 posts
4 tags
Bit.Fall
Bit.fall artistically reveals information gathered from the Internet and delivers the data via controlled particle drips of water to form a waterfall of words. The artist of Bit.fall, Julius Popp, is based in Leipzig and New York, and his work often uses technology and interdisciplinary collaboration to merge art and science. Bit.fall was first revealed in 2005, and it wonderfully blurs the...
3 tags
Burble
bur.ble n.: 1. A gurgling or bubbling sound, as of running water. 2. A rapid, excited flow of speech. 3. A separation in the boundary layer of fluid about a moving streamlined body, such as the wing of an airplane, causing a breakdown in the smooth flow of fluid and resulting in turbulence.
The Burble by Haque Design + Research is constructed with a set of 140 modular units, each supported by 7...
3 tags
Jenny Holzer Projections
Contemporary artist Jenny Holzer has been ephemerally projecting her messages out onto the world for nearly a decade. The city and its architecture, people, and objects become part of the textual gestures as scrolling words overlay spatial settings. Holzer’s medium is writing, and her canvas is the “public.” She explains her work, “I show what I can with words in light and motion in a...
4 tags
Skywalkers
This group of blimp creatures called “skywalkers” was a vision from Friendswithyou, a multi-disciplinary creative studio founded by Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval. During the 2006 Art Basel Miami Beach, the skywalkers filled the skies with 18 colossal creatures, and they marched down the beach in a parade! With the ability to think and produce on a level larger than life, Friendswithyou...
5 tags
Picasso Light Sketches
In 1949, photographer Gjon Mili visited Pablo Picasso in France, and showed him some photographs of ice skaters with lights attached to their skates. Inspired by these photographs, Mili took photos of Picasso using a flashlight to sketch with light in the dark. These light sketchs are “instant Picassos” – disappearing in an instant. The light gesture drawings are pure expressions of Picasso’s...
4 tags
Kate Moss Ghost
Although this occurred 4 years ago, the 3D video of Kate Moss for the finale of Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2006 Ready-to-Wear fashion show in Paris still captivates me. A member of the audience describes the event, “Inside an empty glass pyramid, a mysterious puff of white smoke appeared from nowhere and spun in midair, slowly resolving itself into the moving, twisting shape of a woman...
4 tags
Floating Logos
The photography series “Floating Logos” by Matt Siber was inspired by the abundance of tall signs in the American Mid-west. As a former resident of Indiana for 24 years, I can confirm the proliferation of these signs within the landscape. “Perched atop very tall polls, these corporate beacons emit their message by looming over us in their glowing, plastic perfection,” Siber writes in his project...
4 tags
Silver Clouds
Currently on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Warhol’s Silver Clouds installation involves large helium and oxygen-filled metalized pillow-shaped balloons that tumble and float throughout the exhibit space. Originally created for a 1966 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the ethereal, joyful atmosphere challenged traditional expectations by interacting and touching the viewer....
5 tags
Modular Cubatron
The Modular Cubatron (MC) is the latest project from 3waylabs. 3waylabs was founded in 1990 as Network Wizards, specializing in projects that combined computers and communication. They have been creating a series of “cubatron” projects since 2004. The cubatron projects form a 3-dimensional grid of polycarbonate encased LED pixels that appear to suspend in space. The Modular Cubatron is an array of...