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Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”
Haha Real, a very site-specific installation by Rachel Rossin, opens at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston. Illuminating a path through the subterranean reservoir with LED panels, the American artist draws on eclectic sources including The Velveteen Rabbit (a 1922 children’s book) and “The Creative Act” (a 1957 Marcel Duchamp lecture). Musician frewuhn contributes a score to set the mood for the 400 m journey, which culminates in a “cascade of uncanny sunsets within the darkness.”
Drawing on manar (the Arabic word for lighthouse), the inaugural edition of Manar Abu Dhabi opens in the UAE. Featured are light-based works by Middle Eastern artists (Asma Belhamar, Latifa Saeed, and others) and international figures, including Carsten Höller and teamLab. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer contributes “Translation Island,” a site-specific retrospective featuring ten works, including Dune Ringers (2023, image), which transforms nocturnal desert topography into “travelling waves of light and sound.”
“Synchronicity,” the largest-ever survey of United Visual Artists (UVA) sophisticated immersive installations, opens at London’s 180 Studios. Curated by Julia Kaganskiy, the exhibition presents works including the cosmic geometries of Musica Universalis (2016, image) alongside a new collaboration with Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, which renders a deluge of algorithmically-generated data and headlines to disrupt the “sense of time, coherence, narrative, and consensus reality” of viewers.
“Alluding to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves,” Carsten Nicolai’s solo show “Strahlen / Raggi” opens at the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (FMAV) in Modena (IT). Displayed are tributes to the German artist’s late friend and collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Geiger counter-driven reinterpretation of a Japanese Zen garden, and a pair of installations where sound causes water in rotating parabolic basins to ripple—cleverly warping reflected light (image: reflektor distortion, 2016).
Continuing research into laser works by its namesake artist, Seoul’s Nam June Paik Center sends a “Transmission.” Featured is Transmission Tower, a work realized with laser expert Norman Ballard that was mounted twice: at the Rockefeller Center (2002) and the Sydney Opera House (2004). Audiovisual artist Jeho Yun re-imagines the stroboscopic choreography alongside an array of Paik’s silver classic cars, “faithfully receiving” the late artist’s signals “and sending them out toward the future,” write the curators.
French visual artist Joanie Lemercier shares glimpses of new works in progress that draw on solar rather than projector light. “These photons travelled 150 million kilometers,” he writes about the beam of sunlight used in his lens refraction experiments. “It encompasses the entire electro-magnetic spectrum—visible light, infrared, uv, radio waves, x and gamma rays—and conveys about 500W of energy,” Lemercier notes in subsequent posts. “It’s low tech, yet so much brighter than any high-end projector.”
“Grand Bal,” a retrospective of works by Ann Veronica Janssens, opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. Presenting works from the last three decades, the British artist offers a “visual and sonic choreography” of glass, fog, light, and video for visitors to traverse. Featured works include Golden Section (2009), suspended mirror foil and wrinkled PVC made with Belgian artist Michel François (image), and Blue Glass Roll 405 (2019), a series of cast glass sculptural forms (image foreground).
Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) premieres new works by Pe Lang, Johanna Bruckner, and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler—three Swiss media artists and winners of the 2022 Pax Art Awards—in parallel solo exhibitions. Veteran Lang translated a scene from his forthcoming sci-fi novel into a kinetic light installation, whereas emerging talents Bruckner and Scherler authored CGI video and sculptural works that explore techno-bodies (image: Body Obfuscations, 2023) and climate anxiety.
“Thin Air,” the inaugural exhibition at The Beams London opens, featuring installations by artists 404.zero, James Clar, Robert Henke, Kimchi and Chips with Rosa Menkman, Matthew Schreiber, and S E T U P. Taking full advantage of the venue’s cavernous 5,100 square metres of high-ceilinged post-industrial space, the show presents large-scale immersive spectacle “at the boundaries of light, sound, and space” for visitors to soak up, explore, and lose themselves in (image: 404.zero 324, 2023).
London-based light and media art collective United Visual Artists (UVA) celebrates the 20th anniversary of their studio genesis: Tasked with the (now iconic) stage design of Massive Attack’s 100th Window world tour (2003-4), UVA founders Chris Bird, Matt Clark, and Ash Nehru developed LED typographic displays for politically charged, location-specific real-time data feeds. “At the time, our way of working together was unique,” they write on Instagram. “It went on to inform our practice and studio culture.”
Seoul-based light artist and Kimchi and Chips Co-Founder Elliot Woods teases a new image—or “worlding”—system that renders “an imagined future out of the present day reality” using machine learning, optics, and electromechanics. In a nutshell: A matrix of opto-mechanical cells that “independently pick out features, colours, textures, aesthetics” paired with prisms creates a remix of features in its background. The new system, Woods notes, will premiere in Seoul later this year.
ATELIER-E’s light and sound installation LOOM (2022) opens at HOLON, Berlin as part of CTM/transmediale Vorspiel. Originally commissioned for Bocholt Textile Works, the “never-ending weaving machine” pays homage to Joseph Marie Jacquard’s programmable loom that revolutionized the textile industry. As lasers encode contextual information on motorized phosphorescent threads, ATELIER-E’s Daniel Dalfovo and Christian Losert invite reflection on craft, automation, and the long history of data-driven aesthetics.
Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, aka NONOTAK, unveal their latest kinetic light installation, SORA (2023), at Amsterdam’s Gashouder. A suspended architecture of rotating LED tubes performs a hypnotic choreography high above visitors’ heads in what the Paris-based light and sound art duo describes as an experiment in perpetual motion that interprets the sky. On view for a month, SORA also serves as the backdrop for a series of NONOTAK’s audiovisual live performances.
Mexican-Canadian media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer commemorates the passing of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, a post-modern giant who blended East and the West in his designs, with an anecdote. “I had the honour of meeting him twenty years ago when I staged Amodal Suspension (2003) to open YCAM in Yamaguchi,” writes Lozano-Hemmer. “He told me I could make any intervention I wanted except touch his building, so I made a switchboard of messages relayed by searchlights over it.”
“Three Parallels,” an exhibition centred on a new site-specific installation by Light and Space movement artist Phillip K. Smith III opens at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). In it, Smith’s calibrated use of mirrors, translucent panes, and lighting yields a richly hued environment that responds to atmospheric conditions and suggests “a future … [where we enjoy] a more symbiotic relationship with the digital realm,” writes curator Jennifer McCabe.
Canadian curator Andrew Lochhead revisits the controversy around realities:united’ cancelled public artwork LightSpell (2017), installed at Toronto’s Pioneer Village subway station. The architectural light matrix was designed for visitor messages but never activated over fears of abuse. “We were commissioned to modify the installation’s software,” the artists reveal in the comments about extensive reworks, “but the Toronto Transit Commission stopped replying to us for unknown reasons.”
Joanie Lemercier’s latest solo exhibition opens at Le Tetris in Le Havre, Normandy, France. The show gathers recent works (Slow Violence, Brume, Edges) and new creations, capturing the French artist’s sustained interest in light and activism. In Prairie, a new collaboration with curator Juliette Bibasse, the two change focus from big to small: tracing mundane roadside grasses with small lasers, they shed light on beauty that is often overlooked.
Over the course of Melbourne’s RISING festival, local audio-visual artist Robin Fox alters the city-landscape with a newly commissioned laser composition. MONOCHORD features a powerful, one kilometre-long beam that, at regular intervals, articulates planes and patterns to synchronized sound just above the Yarra River. Playing the beam like a single-string instrument, Fox expresses the changing voltage both visually and sonically to create what he calls “mechanical synaesthesia.”
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