Enlighter
Lighting Design and Light Magazine
January 7th 2009
By: Lucka Slatner

featuring: binary waves, cybernetic urban installation

text:

The installation binary waves is conceived and realized by the Belgian artist group LAb[au] and is produced by French art organization Synesthesie, in the context of Art Grandeur Nature 2008 biennial. The installation invests the area of the Saint-Denis train station, Paris.

binary waves is an urban and cybernetic installation responding to its surrounding (cars, people, electromagnetic fields from mobile phones,..) and transpositioning them into luminous, sonic and kinetic moves. This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as center of the public realm.

The installation binary waves is constituted by a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimeters wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronize the movement of the 32 panels. The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, defining the frequency and amplitude of the rotation. According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the

installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation. All these principles relate the 'micro-events' happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.