Submergence by squidsoup

“For years, the international art group Squidsoup has been trying to realize a fantastic (and somewhat oddly specific) vision: an immersive field of light and color, stretching from floor to ceiling, through which visitors could freely pass. The outfit’s inquiries into the concept began modestly, in 2008, when they collaborated with the engineering- and tech-centric university ETH Zürich to create two small cubes made from LED lights. But the idea of a greater experience lingered, so next came a pair of three-by-three-meter installations, created with the group’s propriety 3-D visualization system, Ocean of Light, in 2011; this time, the scale was there, but the hardware was still too delicate to accommodate people. With their latest piece, however, the group has finally made their initial dream a reality. In a sense a half-decade in the making, Submergence proves that even in the art world, perseverance pays off.

The installation makes use of nearly 400 ceiling-hung strands of LEDs—some 8,000 lights in all. As visitors navigate the vine-like maze, the lights gradually come to life, at first following the interlopers’ movements, or darting away to avoid them, and eventually building into a full-on audiovisual climax, “a kind of ecstatic crescendo, both sonically and visually,” as Anthony Rowe, one of the Squidsoup’s founding members, puts it.

“The LED spaces has been a bit of an obsession … for the last five years,” Rowe says. “The original idea was always to be within the experience, seeing it as an environment rather than an object.” But as they’ve arrived at their vision, the artists and designers of Squidsoup have had to figure out what type of environment, exactly, they hoped to create. Ideally, they decided, it was something that would be experienced, not analyzed.”

via Co.Design