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The public art installation “Sea of Light” illuminates Manhattan’s Seaport District by use of spheres of various sizes. The light show transforms the historic cobblestone streets with warm-colored light from over 150,000 LED bulbs.
Design and technology company Symmetry Labs debuted the project to revitalize the Seaport District and rebuild a sense of community. Alexander Green, founder of Symmetry Labs, explains: “I want people to feel a sense of wonder from my work and engage the community so people would want to visit the Seaport regularly. I wanted something surprising and engaging that would change throughout the year.”
Interactive Installation
Symmetry Labs created an interactive installation where the lighting reacts to movement, clothing color and sound patterns. As a result each interaction provokes a unique lighting pattern. The light globes are equipped with lighting technology and surrounded by thermal cameras that capture movement from video cameras and send information to the spheres, allowing them to glow based on how close or far away people are.
Acrylic is used to Acrylic is used to produce the desired lighting effect: The light shines through the material. A complex undertaking: each sphere is made out of large-format sheets of acrylic. As Green points out: “There is only one company in the entire country that creates such large pieces and the company had never molded them into spheres before”.
You can catch Sea of Light on display from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., until March 2018.
The Place des Festivals in Montréal, Canada provides an unusual sight these days: 13 large illuminated loops have occupied the famous public space. These objects are part of the annual Luminothérapie which is Quebec´s largest competition for temporary public art installations. Most notable feature is the participation of pedestrians, who can play with the loops. The loops are a giant zoetropes, which is an optical toy, that was the ancestor of the animated film. Once activated, flickering images of 13 inspiring fairy tales come to life and can be watched by the participants.
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How does the loop works?
Each loop is two metres in diameter and can be entered by two people, who can activate the installation by pulling levers. A spinning cylinder, with spokes in its running tread, adopt the function of a zoetrope and making a series of still images appear to move. Together with music, the loop creates an animation of fairy tales around the watchers. By changing the tempo at the levers the speed of the moving images and the music can be influenced. The animations are also recognizable from distance and together with video projections on two adjacent buildings, the place is illuminated by flickering lights and images.
The creators
The Luminothérapie is an association of artists, which presents interactive and captivating installations in Montréal every winter. With their work, they want to stimulate creativity in urban design and digital art. Olivier Girouard and Jonathan Villeneuve, the creators of the loops, want to encourage the people’s imagination and participation in public space.
Studio Dennis Parren from Eindhoven, the Netherlands, have developed a multidisciplinary design approach that focuses on using natural and artificial light as a design material. For the Lowlands Festival, the Studio has designed “Lift”, a continuously changing light sculpture.
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Lowlands is one of the biggest music festivals in the Netherlands with over ten stages and 200 artists offering a feast of musical entertainment. The event takes place near Biddinghuizen in the Flevoland region. The designers were inspired by the festival’s “Kiss Another Sky” theme and built a tower of light with a height of 18 metres. It was placed right in the middle of the festival area to create a central meeting point that would be visible from all over the site. The tower was made up of a scaffold, 80 triangular banners and 250 metres of steel cable.
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Photos: Ronald Smits
Read the full article in Topos 94 – City Visions
Daan Roosegaarde is a true renaissance man, working beetween the fields of landscape architecture, green technology, lighting design and art. With his various projects he tries to create new links beetween existing things to make people more aware of the diversity, richness and beauty of our world.
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Topos: How would you describe yourself? Are you an artist or a designer?
Daan Roosegaarde: I would describe myself as Daan Roosegaarde! I don’t believe in all these tags and words. I think the future is about being hybrid and finding new connections between existing things. So I don’t feel the urge to put a label on myself.
Topos: Could you tell me a bit more about yourself?
Daan Roosegaarde: I studied Fine Arts and did a master’s in Architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Eight years ago, I founded my own studio out of a desire for public space, creative thinking, new technology, and an almost naive notion of improving reality.
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Topos: What are your influences?
Daan Roosegaarde: I was always fascinated by the architecture of Arata Isozaki and Japanese Metabolism. This idea of envisioning a new future, which was part of these projects, was very inspiring to me. But at the same time, these projects were mainly about architecture, and not so much about people. That’s why I started to focus on public spaces such as squares, and on infrastructure such as pedestrian tunnels. The notion of social design started to pop up at that time, and the idea of using technology to create new forms of interaction. All of a sudden, technology became less expensive, and microchips became widely available. That was about 2007. At this time, I founded Studio Roosegaarde.
Topos: You describe Studio Roosegaarde as a “Social Design Lab”– what does “social” in this context mean?
Daan Roosegaarde: It means that life is not static, that your environment is open-minded and interested in your input. That you can build up a collective experience and that you have a desire to feel connected with the world around you. Like Marshall McLuhan once said: “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” The question I ask myself is, how we can create environments in which people are able to participate? The horror of all the terror attacks shows what happens when people disconnect from the world around them. Being disconnected creates friction, so I use technology to create social inclusion, which in my opinion is a huge topic in Europe these days.
Topos: How do you create this social inclusion?
Daan Roosegaarde: By making proposals and having a good team of engineers and whiz kids around me. The rest is brute force (laughs). You have an idea, you don’t let go!
Topos: You describe your work as techno poetry – what does that mean?
Daan Roosegaarde: Usually the word “tech” is connected to industry and not to emotions and feelings. I think it’s interesting to combine the two. There is research that I’m part of for the World Economic Forum, which shows that within the next 25 years, a lot of jobs like taxi driver or garbage collector will disapear because of robotisation. The top skills for future humans will be emotional intelligence, complex problem-solving, and creative thinking. In a weird way, that allows us to be human again. When machines become smarter, they become our body. They keep us warm, they keep us safe, they guide us to that which will allow us to focus on things that are unique for human beings. That could be a new Renaissance – some sort of Leonardo da Vinci-like scenario. I think that’s what the term “techno poetry” is about.
Topos: You do a lot of research – How does that work? Are you working with universities?
Daan Roosegaarde: Yes, scientists and universities are very important for us. I have a fixed team in my studio in Rotterdam where the design and research is done, but for a project, they plug in with experts, either in biomimicry or landscape design. It differs for each project. Everybody has his or her own expertise, and it’s my job to create the links between them.
Topos: What role do sustainability and green technology play in your work?
Daan Roosegaarde: It’s the new default. There’s no way back – it’s as simple as that. In our project “Windlicht”, which we’ve been working on for the last two years, this aspect plays a very important role. We wanted to show this positive dimension of wind energy, because a lot of people think that these windparks are really disturbing. I think they’re really beautiful! And they are part of a transition we are in. We wanted to create a more iconic experience of these windparks, and it worked! Thousands of people have come to Zeeland to experience the installation and look at all the lines in the landscape in an almost zen-like state of being.
Read on about Daan Roosegaard’s favorite project in Topos 95 – Light.
The great success of the High Line in New York City has now led to the development of the Lowline, which is also originally based on private initiative. The so-called Lowline Lab, where the feasibility of the underground park is being tested, has been the only active component up to now. If the project is actually built, New York would have yet another attraction.
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New York City’s Lower East side was once a haven for immigrants, but is now a trendy district. It is home to the Lowline Lab, a small tropical island in the middle of the urban jungle that has been open on weekends since the autumn of 2015. The lab is located in an old industrial building next to the picturesque market hall on Essex Street and opposite a bar named after the legendary William “Boss” Tweed, whose political career in the 19th century ended in jail. The Lowline Lab is a test run for something found only in New York: an underground park.
In the lab, two island-like raised beds framed with light-coloured wood contain a variety of tropical plants such as ferns, mosses, agave plants and cactuses, as well as hyacinths and strawberries. Hanging plants in metal nets dangle from the ceiling. The beds in this windowless space are illuminated by skylights, which allow concentrated sunlight to enter thanks to a complex system of parabolic mirrors and optical lenses.
This simulates the conditions of a tropical forest, explains Julius, a volunteer and student at New York University who takes care of visitors. Although the skylights are small, the focused sunlight is strong enough to support photosynthesis. And the plants do actually thrive and grow in this environment, although the air is too cool and dry to be tropical. Julius says this is because they want to offer visitors a pleasant atmosphere, so that as many as possible will stop by.
Underground Jungle. The Lowline Lab’s 12 square metres of beds merely serve as a prototype. Plans call for the creation of a proper tropical landscape consisting of raised beds and climbing plants that has a total of nearly 5,600 square metres several stories below the asphalt streets of the Lower East Side. The idea is to use the Williamsburg Trolley Terminal, a former tram depot beneath Delancey Street, two blocks from the Lowline Lab. The 112-year-old terminal it is a unique industrial monument. It has 7-metre-high vaulted brick ceilings supported by steel columns.
Old cobblestones and track remnants still cover much of the ground. The shadows of this underground tunnel can just be seen from from the platform of lines JMZ at the adjacent Delancey/Essex Street subway stop. The terminal was once the terminus of a trolley line that ran from Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge to the Lower East Side, which at the time was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The first immigrants who lived there came from Germany and Italy, before Jews from Russia and Poland moved in, to be followed by Chinese and Puerto Ricans.
Delancey Street was once the invisible boundary between the Italian and Jewish neighbourhoods. In 1948 the trolley was shut down and since then this underground depot has been vacant. The homeless are the only ones who occasionally come down here now.
Read on about how the neighbourhood gets involved and of what importance the Lowline could be for Chinatown in Topos 95 – Light.
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The use of light is fundamental to the design of public space. It can ruin a space but it can also improve its atmosphere and the well-being of the people using it. Topos 95 looks at examples of how light affects its surroundings and how it inspires architects and planners to transform their environments. A new flood protection system in Hamburg, the transformation of a former trolley terminal in New York, and the design of a public transportation terminal in Arnhem are examples in which light plays an important role in the success of a project. Topos 95 also portrays the innovative work of artist Daan Roosegaarde and lighting designer Ingo Maurer. In addition, it analyses the consequences of a world, that is becoming brighter every day and illustrates ways in which light pollution can be stopped.
These articles are featured in the issue:
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Transforming the Ordinary
Daan Roosegaarde is a true renaissance man, working beetween the fields of landscape architecture, green technology, lighting design and art. With his various projects he tries to create new links beetween existing things to make people more aware of the diversity, richness and beauty of our world.
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A Park in the Cellar
The great success of the High Line in New York City has now led to the development of the Lowline, which is also originally based on private initiative. The so-called Lowline Lab, where the feasibility of the underground park is being tested, has been the only active component up to now. If the project is actually built, New York would have yet another attraction.
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Beyond Blade Runner
Media facades were the sensation of the 2000s. Yet these days, with everyone carrying their very own media facade in the form of a smartphone, questions have started to be raised about the true point of these architectural and urbanistic interventions. Is the media facade still relevant? And if so, how can it really establish some kind of meaningful communication with its surroundings?
