Thanks a lot to all our readers and writers around the world.

Flynn Talbot

UK design studio TROIKA has created a beautiful new work.

The installation called Thixotropes is a reference the work of Frank Gilbreth a pioneer in the field of motion tracking.

The light weight structures spin at high speed around a central axis to create the illusion of illuminated volumes. The inclusion of the cool vs. warm white light adds extra depth and helps further define the separate forms.

Great work!

Posted by: Flynn – NIS Berlin

The very poetic new mesh lamp series by Dutch designer Rick Tegelaar.

His use of existing materials to create beautiful new forms is a breath of fresh air. Just goes to show you don’t need big investment to create innovative new products.

Well done!

Posted by: Flynn – NIS Berlin

via Designboom

With a solid track record in quality projection mapping installations, WHITEvoid takes it to the next level with this exciting new project.

No longer is the pixel mapped area used simply for visual art projections. This new project intrinsically links the effect of the light and the movement of the actors to enhance and heighten the theatre experience.

In a time where the world of light is becoming saturated with projection mapping on static building facades, it’s very refreshing to see this technology used in a new way to enhance the theatre experience on a more human level.

Well done guys.

Posted by: Flynn – NIS Berlin

We love the energy of this video and this amazing light project.

Here is a new work from our friends at Cinimod Studio. It’s a massive scale project with a unique interactive concept and well executed installation to make sure the building really does react to the excitement of the crowd.

A game of football never looked so good.

Posted by: Flynn – NIS Berlin

A very poetic theatre light installation by Tokyo based Matsui Architects.

Matsui Architects crafted a minimal lighting installation for the stage show Hypnagogia (derived from ancient Greek, it references the period between wakefulness and sleep). In a quick chat with Ryo Matsui, NIS learned a few key details about the project.

I attended the ITP Show, at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The show allows graduate students an opportunity to show off their thesis and class projects to the public. If you’re not familiar with the innovative program, it’s described as “a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible.”

Among the incredible variety of techno wonders I saw was a fascinating project by Josh Kleiner called Illumihedron. Ostensibly a pyramid shaped LED mood light, the deceptive fixture was doing way more than I could have imagined beneath it’s acrylic surface. Described by Josh:

Illumihedron is a scalable LED lighting system that maintains the color tone of a visual scene at a user-defined ambient light level. It’s like a thermostat for the visual world. It uses polyhedral shaped light sources to sense the color of its surrounding environment and dynamically adjusts a wide spectrum of LEDs to create a user-selectable color tone. This dynamic lighting approach applies over a range of contexts, from living spaces and workspaces to stage and public space. This lighting system introduces a new function and aesthetic to artificial illumination, as well infuses a sculptural quality with modern lighting technology.

I asked Josh to meet me after the show and discuss the project in more detail, and to speak about the huge potential for creating adaptive architectural lighting systems that communicate with changing light levels to constantly deliver simulated full-spectrum sunlight.

Z: Explain to me the development process for the Illumihedron. How did you come about trying to create this system?
J: [The project] started out as a challenge to try and recreate a natural light source with LEDs. The goal was to produce something that would mimic natural sunlight using the advantages of LEDs: something low cost, not generate a lot of heat or use a lot of electricity, and something relatively long lasting. When I learned about the different light levels and the different colors that are possible using RGB LEDs, I figured that was the right path to take for developing a prototype. Using the help of Eric Rosenthal (ITP’s scientist in residence), I was pointed in the direction of a Texas Instruments sensor that detected ambient light, the same sort of sensors used in digital cameras or used in the quality control testing of the Pantone swatches, to read the color of ambient light in a room, and then transform the wavelength of light into a RGB value. A computer program in communication with an Arduino micro-controller takes that RGB value, plots it somewhere on the HSL Color space and then using an equation, tells the LEDs which lights to illuminate to achieve the desired color balance.

Z: So it’s like white-balance for a room?
J: Right. So instead of the auto-white balance in your camera being used to capture the correct wavelengths of light, this is using the opposite process. Its going to use color-balance to project the correct color of light needed to achieve correct white-balance, depending on the changing temperature of ambient light.

Z: When you think about scalability, do you imagine whole rooms or buildings being installed with adaptive color-balance lighting as a way of designing architecture better suited to our biological responses to changing light?
J: Yes. It would absolutely save our brain from the tedious process of constantly having to readjust our perception of color temperature. From sunlight, to florescent, to incandescent, and the light from our computer screens, we are constantly readjusting our perception of light throughout the day. Our brain uses color constancy, which is the biological process that is being reproduced in electronics for auto white-balance. In terms of scalability I see the Illumihedron becoming more effective the larger it gets. The more vertices you have to mount a color sensor on, the more angles you have to measure light levels, so your going to more precisely correct the color-balance of the space. The prototype was a tetrahedron, so It would be used for a desk spaces. If you wanted a system to illuminate an Atrium or a Ball Room, you need to try and have as much information about that room as possible, which means a polygon with many more sides.

Z: There doesn’t seem to be any reasonable means of using full spectrum lighting in the built environment outside of the HMI’s and large scale lighting used in film and photo production.
J: Our eyes have evolved over millions of years to see the world as its lit by sunlight, having a continuous spectrum of light. I think thats  how instinctively we want to see the world. When you apply that to a creative production as a photographer or cinematographer, you grow to love the radiance of natural sunlight. HMIs do a great job of reproducing that spectrum, but at the cost of being extremely expensive to operate. They get very hot and can be dangerous, and it’s really not practical when you are trying to illuminate a large scale environment. A combination of different light sources can simulate the continuous spectrum we get from the Sun or from an HMI without the pitfalls of the inefficiency of those sources. I decided that using RGB LEDs and LEDs that use difference phosphors to illuminate different parts of the spectrum would work really well at mimicking the continuous spectrum. The RGB LEDs themselves only emit narrow bands of the visible spectrum, but when you use a number of them (you can buy up to eleven different colors now), and supplement that with a small dimmable halogen light you get really close to being able to reproduce the spectrum that our eyes have evolved to be able to see, and the aesthetic that most of us have grown to enjoy and rely on.

Z: Do you see architecture and lighting design becoming more closely associated with interaction design?
J: Absolutely. If we’re not standing on the frontier of adaptive lighting technology becoming something that is common place now, we are on our way. It’s even being thought about in consumer electronics. Television manufactures have produced a range of ambient lighting technologies that are designed to augment the television viewing experience by taking it beyond the “box”. As I see it applied to architectural lighting, I think it would provide the opportunity to have an intelligent light source that is capable of sensing the light in the environment and then being able to offset a color temperature so when you need a space to be lit in a certain way, you can rely on the lighting technology to reproduce the colors that you need.

Amazing project with huge potential. Thanks Josh!

Posted by: Zack – NIS New York

Fragmented forms and stolen stars currently showing at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer.

We loved the strong visual nature of Angela Bulloch‘s work in her current solo exhibition. The dynamic evolution of the 3-D “Perverted Pixels” from 2008, is memorable and strengthened with the new adjoining painting “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” on the near by wall.

A strong contrast to these works, is the piece “Night Sky: Saturn North from Earth” pictured below. This project has a lighter, more natural feel with an impressive scale.

The exhibition ends on the 21st of Jan 2012.

Posted by: Flynn – NIS Berlin

via contemporaryartdaily