Osc1ll0
Oscillation _ wave like motion
silo _ industrial building
0/1_ binary counting

Year of conception: 2010

Project team:
LAb[au], Manuel Abendroth, Jerome Decock, Els Vermang

Concept: fLUX

about:
The kinetic light sculpture osc1ll0 has been conceived for the public art competition initiated in the context of the rehabilitation of the 'silo', a former industrial building in the harbor of Marseille, into a cultural facility, a 2500 place theater and opera house. The rehabilitation of the 'silo' takes part of an ambitious town-planning, taking advantage of Marseille being cultural capital in 2013, to transform the former industrial waterfront into a pedestrian and cultural area.

The sculpture has been conceived as an entrance gate for the new cultural facility hanging from the downside of a highway viaduct which separates the 'silo' from the new urban development area. In order to 'bridge' this barrier, the installation transforms the residual space of infrastructure into a public space articulating the linear structure of the highway with the transversal entrance axis of the theatre. As such the project is (operates) as much as an architectural as artistic intervention knitting together the new pedestrian waterfront, the car infrastructure and the activity of the new cultural facility.

The sculpture is constituted of 256 sticks of 5m length each balancing on a central horizontal axis of 128m length suspended from the viaduct. The sticks are illuminated on one side in red and on the other in white. These colors are derived by the surrounding industrial and infrastructural equipment as the architectural - red container- extension of the 'silo'. The balancing sticks illuminate the ceiling, the downside of the highway viaduct, in red or white, forming colored waves pulsing from one side of the installation to the other. The oscillatory motion of the sculpture illuminates the dark space below the highway viaduct as it varnish the rough concrete of its construction in red and white. Further the synchronized and wavelike motion parallel to the highway, underlines the urban flow as it recalls the nearby sea from which the highway actually cuts of the pedestrian.

The oscillation of the sticks, their speed and amplitude, is depending on different parameters:
The sea tides defining the rotation sense and amplitude of the sticks as certain 'key positions', such as alignments, are programmed according to the activity of the cultural facility. For example the sticks take a 0 or 1 position (minimum or maximum rotation angle) in the beginning or ending of a show. Here the installation suddenly takes the shape of a light marquee, an iconic shape imprinted in our imaginary from movie theaters of the 50's and 60's.

Such 'key positions', as the kinetic patterns formed by the installation, are mirroring the urban activity and flows whereas the color and light plays transpose contextual elements into its own aesthetics. The project title 'osc1llo' fuses these different elements between the silo and its driving and controlling binary logic as it describes the installation main kinetics, its oscillation.