monoChronoFacade
time based monochrome illumination
LAb[au] 2014

commission: Liedts-Meesen Foundation
Zebrastraat, Ghent Belgium

about the project:
monoChrono is a light artwork created for the facade of the Zebrastraat building in Ghent, at the request of the Liedts-Meesen Foundation.
monoChrono relates the basic units of time (hours, minutes and seconds) with the primary colors of light (red, green and blue). Any given point of time can be expressed as the sum of the specific values of the hours, minutes and seconds, and be represented by a monochrome obtained by summing up the specific values of red, green, and blue.
The light art work can be seen from sunset to sunrise. At sunset, the RGB values reach their minimal level, yielding black. At sunrise, they reach their maximum, yielding white. As time evolves between sunset and sunrise, the color evolves between these two extremes. As, the length of the night evolves in the course of a year and depends on the location on earth, consequently the color of a given point of time on a given day will depend on these contextual values. So the monochrome evolves in function of time and space.

In this way, the artwork describes a cycle of colored artificial light, while relating to the phenomenon of the circadian cycle. A circadian cycle is a 24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings, attuned to external guidance, including natural light. A "circadian distortion" includes the confusions that occur at the interchange of day and night.

The light artwork is accompanied by an app, which visualizes the current hue at its current location for the current time. From sunset to sunrise red, green and blue are summed up, from sunrise to sunset colors are deducted. The monoChronoApp aims to connect the personal space of the spectator with the public space of the light artwork. It is available for i-phone, windows phone and android, and can be downloaded from the website of Zebrastraat.

Six pigment prints are also on display at Zebrastraat. They represent the first six hours of a 24 hour cycle, where time is visualized through a logic of additive blended color-surfaces.