126 LIGHT + TECH
SOPHISTICATED TECHNIQUES and technologies such as projection mapping have long been a feature of light festivals, exhibitions and shows (Pink Floyd’s The Wall being an early and classic example), and are now finding more permanent expression. While they are multimedia audiovisual installations, lighting is generally central to these immersive experiences, which can involve 360° projection, backlighting, refraction and reflection, and lighting tools such as lasers and LEDs.
Last August, Amsterdam, the home of the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, saw the opening of just such a next-generation art gallery. The Nxt Museum is the first space in the Netherlands dedicated to what it describes as ‘new media art’. Meanwhile, in France – also last year – Culturespaces opened what is billed as the largest digital art centre in the world: Les Bassins de Lumières, located in a former submarine base in Bordeaux. There is a mix introducing innovative new installations and, especially in the case of the French Culturespaces venues (this is its third and largest in France), redefining our perception of familiar, traditional artworks, allowing viewers effectively to step inside the world of paintings, observing the minutiae of brushstrokes, lines and material effects. Currently, this is largely in the realm of art and entertainment, but the immersive experience has implications for future interiors. Static backlit elements have featured in commercial interiors for years, and dynamic versions are increasingly common as a way of cheering up, say, an otherwise tedious patch of airport (Daan Roosegaarde’s Beyond at Schiphol Airport, where a special printing technique creates the illusion of dynamism), or, in the case of CaixaBank’s new All in One flagship ofices in Barcelona, providing bucolic views on three floors where LED screens project landscape imagery.
Just as those monstrous animated Blade Runner-esque billboards became a reality only a few years afterwards, the animated, mutable interior is already with us. Companies such as teamLab have demonstrated this with installations like the Waso Tea House (a promotional venture for cosmetics company Shiseido) and one of its latest projects, Reconnect, which, unlikely as it sounds, is an exhibition that combines art and sauna.
These and other digital creations are inspirational, powerful, often positively trippy, and redefining our apprehension of light, dark, space and reality. The doors of perception indeed.
NXT MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
Located in the cultural hub of Amsterdam- Noord, a redeveloped wharf area, the Nxt Museum has a three- fold programme of exhibitions, performances and learning and research. Its 1,400m2
exhibition
space includes two regularly rotating spaces: Nxt Lab is a dynamic area for education, research and development, and home to the artist residency programme, while Nxt Stage provides a platform for innovative performances and audiovisual art.
The inaugural event was ‘Shifting Proximities’, which aptly examined how human experience and interaction are affected by social and technological change. It featured eight large-scale, multisensory,
multidisciplinary art installations, four commissioned by and premiered at the museum.
Each was created in collaboration with local and international artists,
designers, technologists, scientists and musicians, ‘fusing creative ideas with pioneering academic research and technological innovation’. Among the participants was London-based art practice United Visual Artists (UVA), long familiar to the UK lighting community, which created one of the newly commissioned works, Topologies #1. ‘Living in London, a hub for innovation and home to some of the world’s most forward-looking art institutions,’ explains Merel van Helsdingen, founder and managing director of the museum, ‘inspired me to create a new space to champion the incredible art being produced today with groundbreaking tools. The Netherlands has a long tradition of leading developments in the art world, and Nxt Museum has been created in this spirit. Our multisensory exhibitions are designed to shift not only our visitors’ experience of art, but to inspire new understandings of the world around them and their place within it.’
nxtmuseum.com
MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST
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