Light installations represent an exciting new frontier in art, with the boundaries of lighting innovation being pushed by gallery spaces and artist collectives akin. By Jill Entwistle

Words by Jill Entwistle

Sophisticated techniques and technologies such as projection mapping accept long been a feature of lite festivals, exhibitions and shows (Pink Floyd'south The Wall being an early and archetype example), and are now finding more permanent expression. While they are multimedia audiovisual installations, lighting is mostly central to these immersive experiences, which can involve 360° projection, backlighting, refraction and reflection, and lighting tools such equally lasers and LEDs.

Image Credit: DAVID ZARZOSO
Image Credit: DAVID ZARZOSO

Concluding Baronial, 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 infinite in the netherlands dedicated to what it describes as 'new media art'. Meanwhile, in France – also last year – Culturespaces opened what is billed equally the largest digital art centre in the world: Les Bassins de Lumières, located in a onetime 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 finer to pace inside the globe of paintings, observing the minutiae of brushstrokes, lines and material furnishings.

Currently, this is largely in the realm of art and entertainment, but the immersive feel has implications for hereafter interiors. Static backlit elements take featured in commercial interiors for years, and dynamic versions are increasingly mutual as a fashion of cheering up, say, an otherwise tiresome patch of airport (Daan Roosegaarde'due south Beyond at Schiphol Drome, where a special printing technique creates the illusion of dynamism), or, in the instance of CaixaBank's new All in One flagship offices in Barcelona, providing bucolic views on three floors where LED screens projection 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 information technology 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, nighttime, 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 threefold plan of exhibitions, performances and learning and research. Its 1,400m2 exhibition infinite includes two regularly rotating spaces: Nxt Lab is a dynamic area for education, research and development, and home to the artist residency plan, while Nxt Stage provides a platform for innovative performances and audiovisual art.

The inaugural consequence was 'Shifting Proximities', which aptly examined how human feel and interaction are affected by social and technological alter. It featured eight large-scale, multisensory, multidisciplinary art installations, iv commissioned past and premiered at the museum.

This image Two of the key founding principles of Amsterdam's Nxt Museum are its multisensory and multidisciplinary approach. Image Credit: MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST
This paradigm Two of the cardinal founding principles of Amsterdam's Nxt Museum are its multisensory and multidisciplinary arroyo. Image Credit: MARSHMALLOW Laser FEAST

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 do United Visual Artists (UVA), long familiar to the UK lighting customs, which created one of the newly commissioned works, Topologies #1.

'Living in London, a hub for innovation and dwelling to some of the globe's most forrad-looking art institutions,' explains Merel van Helsdingen, founder and managing director of the museum, 'inspired me to create a new infinite to champion the incredible art existence 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 just our visitors' feel of art, just to inspire new understandings of the earth around them and their identify inside information technology.'
nxtmuseum.com


LES BASSINS DE LUMIÈRES, BORDEAUX

Founded in 1990, Culturespaces is a private operator in managing monuments, museums and art centres around the world. Since 2012, it has go a pioneer in the creation of digital art centres and digital immersive exhibits. Les Bassins de Lumières joins the organisation'southward two other French digital art centres, but has a surface expanse three times the size of the Carrières de Lumières in Les Baux-de-Provence, and five times the Atelier des Lumières in Paris.

Culturespaces's newest digital gallery space in Bordeaux pulls its visitors into the immersive worlds of art, both older and contemporary. Image Credit: CULTURESPACES ANAKA PHOTOGRAPHIE
Culturespaces's newest digital gallery space in Bordeaux pulls its visitors into the immersive worlds of art, both older and gimmicky. Paradigm Credit: CULTURESPACES ANAKA PHOTOGRAPHIE

Like its smaller forerunners, this latest venue from Culturespaces will nowadays monumental immersive digital exhibitions of major artists. With 12,000m2 of projection surface and 3,000m2 of itinerary floor space, the huge area of the former submarine base matches the ambitious scale of these exhibitions. This is further enhanced past the reflective possibilities of four enormous water basins, each 110m long, 22m wide and 12m deep – a total surface area of 13,000m2. Visitors will move through the infinite on gangways above the h2o and along the quays of the enormous basins. A total of 90 video projectors and 80 speakers are used to create the experience.

A still from one of the opening exhibitions, 'Paul Klee: Painting music'. Image Credit: CULTURESPACES ANAKA PHOTOGRAPHIE
A however from one of the opening exhibitions, 'Paul Klee: Painting music'. Image Credit: CULTURESPACES ANAKA PHOTOGRAPHIE

While the emphasis is on literally displaying one-time works in a new lite, a space called Le Cube will be devoted to gimmicky artists that specialise in immersive art. It will nowadays works past established and up-and-coming digital artists.

The gallery's opening exhibitions were called 'Gustav Klimt: Gold and colour' and 'Paul Klee: Painting music'.
bassins-lumieres.com


TEAMLAB

An fine art commonage formed in 2001, Tokyo-based teamLab is an interdisciplinary creative group that brings together professionals from various digital fields: artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, web and print graphic designers, and editors. They call themselves 'ultratechnologists', with an calendar 'to go beyond the boundaries between art, scientific discipline, technology and creativity, through co-creative activities'. While it does piece of work on commonage principles, there is little doubt the artistic force behind the project comes from founder and CEO Toshiyuki Inoko.

teamLab, a creative collective based in Japan, creates stunning lightworks, inducing wonder from every age group
teamLab, a creative collective based in Japan, creates stunning lightworks, inducing wonder from every historic period group

The group's work is in permanent collections around the world, with widespread international representation by Stride Gallery. Its creations are often characterised past rich natural imagery, what it describes equally 'digitised nature', and its ethos is based on making people more aware of their connexion to the natural world. I of its most aggressive works to date – iv years in the making – was a large outdoor drove of fine art installations entitled A Forest Where Gods Live (2017). They were scattered through Mifuneyama Rakuen, a 500,000m2 garden in Takeo, Japan.

its Universe Inside A Teacup, light flowers blooming
its Universe Inside A Teacup, light flowers blooming

'When nosotros're in the city, we think we're leading an independent beingness,' Inoko told the Japan Times in 2017. 'But in reality, life has been around for at least iv billion years. And even though humans have been around for a very long fourth dimension, it's hard for us to fathom that awareness that nosotros are a part of nature.'

Its recent and forthcoming projects include teamLab Forest, a new museum in Fukuoka, and, together with Es Devlin and James Turrell, dynamic, large-scale installations for an countdown grouping exhibition chosen Every Wall is a Door at the new experiential art centre, Superblue Miami in Florida.

the works are some of the most immersive installations in the world
the works are some of the almost immersive installations in the globe

Possibly its most extraordinary proposition to date is the planned teamLab Reconnect, a new art and sauna exhibition 'where visitors experience art in their finest mental state' – the so-called sauna trance. 'Scientifically speaking,' according to teamLab, 'sauna trance is an exceptionally unique neurological state brought about past alternate hot and cold baths – repeated exposure to saunas, cold water and rest. When inbound a sauna trance, the senses sharpen, the mind clears, [and] the beauty of the surrounding globe comes into focus.'

teamLab's Levitation, where a large sphere reacts to touch and interference before returning suspended between floor and ceiling
teamLab's Levitation, where a big sphere reacts to touch and interference earlier returning suspended between flooring and ceiling

Several pieces will exist on view at Reconnect, including a new group of works based on teamLab's new art project, 'Supernature Phenomena', a projection that focuses on occurrences that transcend the laws of nature and outcome in changes in perception. One such work is Levitation, which features a sphere levitating in the infinite between the floor and ceiling, floating upwardly and downwards as through defying the concept of mass and gravity. The sphere falls to the footing and rolls away when people hit or affect it. But if there is no external interference, it will slowly rise into the air again, as though restoring itself to an original state.

'When a person views 'Supernature Phenomena', such as the disobedience of universal gravitation, this causes their perception to change, thus leading to a new cerebral feel that differs from that of everyday life,' teamLab said in support of the installation'due south unveiling.

'[Works by teamLab] might non fit into the traditional definition of artwork,' the grouping's Singapore gallerist, Ikkan Sanada, said in that same Japan Times article, 'but it was the same affair when photography was introduced or video art was introduced. Ten years from now, people will recognse that what teamLab was creating was a new field of creative expression, which is "digital art".'
team-lab.net