Lightwave brings together some of the most inspirational Irish and international scientists, designers and artists to spark off many creative collisions between art and science. The nine-day Lightwave festival starting on January 23 in Dublin features talks, workshops, performances and a LightClub where new enlightened ideas develop over a cocktail. Following the festival the interactive Lightwave exhibition will run on at the Science Gallery until February 20th.
Antony Nevin and Karen Curley are both Lecturers at Massey University's Institute of Communication Design in Wellington and have been selected to show a project called LIGHTBOX at the festival.Lightwave brings together some of the most inspirational Irish and international scientists, designers and artists to spark off many creative collisions between art and science. The nine-day Lightwave festival starting on January 23 in Dublin features talks, workshops, performances and a LightClub where new enlightened ideas develop over a cocktail. Following the festival the interactive Lightwave exhibition will run on at the Science Gallery until February 20th.
Antony Nevin and Karen Curley are both Lecturers at Massey University's Institute of Communication Design in Wellington and have been selected to show a project called LIGHTBOX at the festival.The LIGHTBOX project is an environment created using a room converted into a large-scale camera obscura, and digital technology. By standing inside LIGHTBOX a person will be surrounded by images of the Aurora Australis taken from data, video and photographs from Scott Base and McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. This imagery is then projected using the Camera Obscura effect into the darkened space.
LIGHTBOX is created in partnership with the New Zealand Government's 'AntarcticaNZ' Scott Base on Ross Island, The American NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), as well as using imagery filmed by Anthony Powell (who is a photographer and Satellite Communications Technician working in Antarctica at McMurdo Station. We have also commissioned a sound scape for the piece created by Galician (north west Spain) sound artist Servando Barreiro that is based on underwater sound, which is recorded by two hydrophones belonging to the German Alfred Wegener Institute at PALAOA, located on the Ekstrom ice shelf.
The LIGHTBOX's Visual and scientific data from the activity of the Aurora Australis will be extrapolated from NOAA POES satellite. LIGHTBOX will also be streaming web-cam imagery from AntarcticaNZ's Scott Base and NOAA's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin.
All in the name of considering light as a revered substance, and playing with patterns and multiple images in order to create a space for contemplation...
The installation is in the form of a blacked-out room (the LIGHTBOX), which we had built within the gallery space, it is completely dark except for a sprawl of tiny points of light, which stretch across three walls of the LIGHTBOX.
Using an accurate starchart of the southern night sky for January 15th, a starfield of pinholes are transferred to the walls of the LIGHTBOX. The light from these pinholes, projected onto a rear projection screen inside the LIGHTBOX, results in an array of camera obscura images of the outside scene, arranged in the pattern of the constellations above.
We have used footage of the Aurora Australais and life at McMurdo Station in Antarctica and project this onto the walls of the gallery in which the LIGHTBOX sits. This means that when you are inside the LIGHTBOX you see
A sprawl of glowing points which resolves into a pattern that is a starchart of the southern sky.
Upon closer inspection each glowing pinpoint of light is, in fact, a tiny camera obscura of the walls of gallery onto which we have projected the Antarctic scenes. As The Aurora Australis glows, clouds form and dissipate, The sun and moon rises and sets and people pass by the projections, the entire room pulses and darkens with a thousand tiny upside-down images of the Aurora Australis, or people, passing through the pinpoints of light. As the projection shows the moon racing behind Mt Erebus, the installation becomes a thousand points of direct moonlight.
This double optical illusion, which causes the viewer, at first, to doubt their own vision, has been realized through the simplest of means. Large sheets of MDF which create the LIGHTBOX, have been punched with many pinholes, in the arrangement of the Southern sky
Over this pinhole star map has been placed a variety of Fresnel screens
(Some reclaimed from the tops of OHP's and others made for us) large rear-projection screen, so that it sits up against the MDF, with the screen only an inch or two away from the pinholes. The screen becomes the surface on which light coming through the window, and then through the pinholes in the cardboard, creates the phenomenon which is known as camera obscura - an upside down picture of the world outside the pinhole.
The arrangement of many, many pinholes creates many, many camera obscuras on the screen, and creates the overall effect of being two things at once within the darkened gallery space: at once it is both a star map for glowing points of light, and a mosaic image of the world outside, made up of thousands of tiny images. The resultant work fluxes and moves with the Antarctic environment.
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22/01/09