If you enjoyed learning about Soo Sunny Park’s Unwoven Light installation at Rice Gallery earlier this month, you’ll like this new documentary short by filmmaking duo Angela and Mark Walley of Walley Films. The film covers the installation period and opening of Park’s chain-link fence installation and you learn quite a bit more about the artist’s process and intent behind her imaginative, surreal artwork. If you’re unable to make it to Houston to see this in person, this is the next best thing.
Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013 / Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas / Photo by Nash Baker
Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013 / Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas / Photo by Nash Baker
Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013 / Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas / Photo by Nash Baker
Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013 / Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas / Photo by Nash Baker
Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013 / Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas / Photo by Nash Baker
Currently on view at Rice Gallery is this shimmering installation titled Unwoven Light by Soo Sunny Park, comprised of some 37 sections of chain-link fence embedded with translucent sections of Plexiglas. The suspended waveforms capture and reflect nearly every light source in the gallery creating a fractalized rainbow of color that changes quality depending on the time of day. Of the work Park says, “We don’t notice light when looking so much as we notice the things light allows us to see. Unwoven Light captures light and causes it to reveal itself, through colorful reflections and refractions on the installations surfaces and on the gallery floor and walls.”
The installation will be up through August 30th, and if you’ve never stopped by Rice Gallery before, chief curator Kim Davenport and assistant Joshua Fischer have brought some incredible artists to the space over the last few years, definitely worth a look. Several photos above by Nash Baker. (via my modern met)
Update: Added a new documentary short courtesy Walley Films.
Last year artist Miya Ando traveled to Puerto Rico where she released 1,000 non-toxic resin leaves coated with phosphorescence into a small pond. During the day the leaves would “recharge” and at night would give off a ghostly, ethereal glow much like the light of a firefly. Titled Obon, the installation was inspired by a Japanese Buddhist festival of the same name that honors the spirits of one’s ancestors. The leaves were also meant to simulate Puerto Rico’s bioluminescent bays, a natural phenomenon caused by dinoflagellates, photosynthetic underwater organisms that emit light when agitated.
You can learn more about Ando’s artwork over at Spoon and Tamago who stopped by for a studio visit not to long ago. You can also follow her on Tumblr and if you’re in the NYC area next month she’ll have a solo exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery starting June 20th. Photography courtesy L. Young.
Laser Forest is the lastest creation from a creative studio known as Marshmallow Laser Feast comprised of Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas, and Barney Steel who have focused almost exclusively on creating interactive experiences over the past two years. This latest installation involves a forest of 150 interactive rods installed in an empty factory space that when touched trigger both light and audio cues, effectively creating a large interactive instrument. Laser Forest was commission for the STRP Biennale in Eindhoven last month, and you can learn much more about at the Creators Project.
The folks over at Redbull (previously for cranberry bog wakeboarding) are currently holding a photography competition called Red Bull Illume which is billed as “the world’s premier international photography competition dedicated to the world of action and adventure sports.” One of the latest entries to the competition is this awesome set of photos captured by photographer and light painter Patrick Rochon in conjunction with Snap! Orlando who brought on a team of wakeboarders including Mike Dowdy, Adam Errington, and Dallas Friday. The trio rode special wakeboards affixed with LEDs designed by Snap! while Rochon shot from the shore. You can read more over on Redbull Illume, and for more illuminated hijinx check out L.E.D Wakeboarding by Jacob Sutton. (via we seek)
FLUIDIC is the result of a unique collaboration between Hyundai’s Advanced Design Center and Berlin-based studio WHITEvoid. The interactive light sculpture is made from 12,000 suspended spheres that act as three dimensional pixels, or voxels. Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time. Via WHITEvoid:
A seemingly floating point cloud above a water pond and consisting of 12,000 translucent spheres marks the heart of the installation. Due to a complex computer algorithm the spheres are arranged seemingly random within the cloud. At the same time the algorithm observes the positions and projection angles of eight high-speed laser projectors that are being arranged around the artwork. They are sending out beams scanning through the arrangement of the cloud. Generating bright and dim light points, this creates a highly organic and natural distribution of voxels (3D pixels). Emerging lines and shapes finally form graphical compositions without any sweet or blind spots. Keeping the same density and intensity the FLUIDIC graphics enables their viewers to observe and interact with it from every point of view.
FLUIDIC will be on display at the Temporary Museum for New Design in Milan through April 14th.
If you liked this project, there are several other artists working with interactive light fields lately, many of which have appeared here on Colossal including the flexible Firewall, the Water Light Graffiti system and also Submergence.
Like a freak midnight rainbow, this ongoing series of lit waterfalls titled Neon Luminance is part of a collaboration between Sean Lenz and Kristoffer Abildgaard over at From the Lenz. The duo dropped high-powered Cyalume glow sticks in a variety of colors into various waterfalls in Northern California and then made exposures varying from 30 seconds to 7 minutes to capture the submerged trails of light as the sticks moved through the current. To accomplish some of the more complicated shots they strung several sticks together at once to create different patterns of illumination. For those of you concerned about pollution, the sticks (which are buoyant) were never opened and were collected at the end of each exposure, thus no toxic goo was mixed into the water. See more from the project on their website.
Approach a sculpture by artist Diet Wiegman and you might be left scratching your head at this random assembly of trash and objects, but shine a light on this same pile of detritus and suddenly a perfectly formed shadow appears: the unmistakable form of Michael Jackson, Michelangelo’s David or even a faithful recreation of the Earth’s surface as it reflects off a metal tray. In no way limited to shadows, the the artists career which spans nearly 50 years (most of what you see above was created in the 1980s) has also involved ceramics, paint, and photography. Two other accomplished artists, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, have also created similar shadow sculptures, though most of these works by Wiegman appear to pre-date them a bit. You can see 38 light sculptures on his blog and read a bit more over on Alafoto. (via ignant)
