Coolest Light Sculptures… Ever

May 12, 2009 by uphaa.blog

Light sculpture is an intermedia and time based artform in which sculpture or any kind of art object produces light, or the reverse, in the sense that light is manipulated in such a way as to create a sculptural as opposed to temporal form or mass. Most often light sculpture artists were primarily either visual artists or composers, not having started out directly making light sculpture.

Field of light

Field of Light can be seen at the Eden Project in Cornwall from 1st November 2008 – 31st March 2009. Bruce Munro and five assistants worked over three days to install it on the grass roof of the visitor’s centre, between the Rainforest and Mediterranean Biomes. It is made of 6,000 acrylic stems, through which fibre optic cables run, each crowned with a clear glass sphere. There are 11 external projectors; the stems themselves hold no electric power at all. The installation covers an area of 60 x 20 meters, using 24, 000 meters of fibre optic cable. It’s best viewed after dark.

Kubik modular light brick nightclub

Where do architecture, sustainability, light and music converge? At Kubik, a very hip, greenly-designed nightclub located in Barcelona.
Kubik was a temporary open-air installation linking architecture, light and music with a contemporary air of reclaimed material usage. A radically different nightclub, the space is open to the sky and besides the sea, the structure built from hundreds of reclaimed, stacked, and illuminated industrial tanks.

PET lights, recyling plastic bottles

Did you know that it takes 200 – 300 years for a plastic water bottle or soda bottle to decompose? Horrible thought. The PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) material that is used to make the bottles can be reground, but that is a costly process.
The most efficient way to recycle plastic bottles is to reuse them, and Austrian design company Walking-Things.com has the perfect design-it-yourself solution! With the PET Light, which Walking-Things claims was the first ever hanging lamp system for plastic bottles, you can make one or a hundred hanging lamps, creating tame or totally wild ones.

Volume at the V&A

. Volume is a sculpture of light and sound, an array of light columns positioned in the centre of the garden. The installation responds to human movement, creating a series of audio-visual experiences.

Constellation – Covent Garden Winter Lights

Launched as the flagship piece of the winter season program at Covent Garden the installation featured 600 custom-designed mirrored LED tubes hanging above the entire Covent Garden market space. The volumetric arrangement of the tubes created a canvas in which three dimensional light formations were made possible. Constellation was also individually controllable using a custom-designed control panel, giving the installation an intimate connection with the public.

Matrix II

Erwin Redl makes art from LED lights. That’s right, LED as in Light Emitting Diode. That’s the stuff in traffic lights, tv remotes and even some fancy shoes. Austrian born Redl plies his LED works on a massive scale such as his “Nocturnal Flow”, which uses the 85-foot brick column to support 10,000 LEDs which adjust the flow of their pattern-waves to the rhythm of the sun.
Erwin Redl’s “Matrix II” is a 36 by 26 foot installation piece composed of a grid-work of floating green LEDs. Hung from long strings, the lights become a patchwork of points as if space itself were punctured and emitting a soft green light at its joints. While this may evoke childhood memories of Disney’s Tron, Redl is in fact deadly serious with his light-emitting art creations.
According to Redl his works are meant to explore the nature of art after the dawn of the digital age. Like all art traditions, sculpture and its spatial subject matter are thrown into disarray by the pseudo-reality of our circuit suffused epoch.

Sitooterie

Derived from the Scottish, a ’sitooterie’ is a small building in which to literally “sit oot”.
The structure is a cube punctured by over 5000 long thin windows that project from all its surfaces and lift it off the ground. The cube, which measures 2.4 x 2.4 metres, is precision-machined from 15mm anodised aluminium and the windows are 18mm square-section aluminium tubes glazed with transparent orange acrylic.
As the long thin windows all point at the exact centre of the cube, it only takes a single light source, located at this central point, to send light through every tube, causing the windows to glow orange. A small number of them also project into the cube to form seating.

Array

‘Array’ is a field of columns set in the courtyard of the Chuya Nakahara Memorial Museum in Southern Japan. The columns create a field of light and sound which gently shifts in response to the viewers’ movements, via a hidden network of ultrasonic sensors. Each column is lit by a pure, shimmering white light. This forest of light light calls you in, and its response to your movement invites you to explore. Inside the grid lives a spirit, in the form of a single pure red light. This spirit is timid but often playful, revealing itself boldly then disappearing.

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