LUX Symposium_ part 2

So I won't go over all the speakers because that will take forever and probably won't be very interesting. I will however, go over some of my favourites, because I think they're awesome and everyone should know about them. I've scanned in the notes I took - mostly for Kay - but how much sense they will make I don't know. There are also included my little doodles which also may or may not make sense.

I've already mentioned Squidsoup, so I won't go over that again, although I will repeat that they are worth checking out.
The keynote speaker for the first day was Els Vermang from LAb[au], who have some fantastic large-scale light art in Brussels, illuminating the Dexia Tower.

There was a small station set up at the base of the tower through which any member of the public could, via touchscreen, change and animate the lighting of the building using a series of shutters. The illumination affected the whole city as the coloured light changed the mood of the environment around the landmark building as well. When you were satisfied with your choices, you could even have a photograph taken of the building to use as an e-card to send to friends. The owner of the tower (a bank) paid around €10m for the artwork. In an unrelated occurrence, they went bankrupt. It's still a fantastic piece, though :D
Els also gave her talk via Skype as she couldn't be in New Zealand for the symposium... I thought it was quite nice that an event centering around light, space and interactivity should begin with a live webcam-based presentation. 

Jørn Knutsen was someone I wasn't really expecting to be interested in, but the work he and his collaborators came up with was so beautiful, creative and deceptively simple I had to share it. The Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi was particularly fascinating.
Armed with a 4m long wand with LEDs and a WiFi signal detector attached, Jørn and co. used long-exposure photography to create a light-painting of WiFi signal strength in various areas in Oslo. This led to some lovely ethereal, architectural shapes made entirely of light.

The way the 'wall' of WiFi signal seems at once both physical and incorporeal ties in nicely with their aim of 'making the invisible visible'. Jørn mentioned they took a lot of time considering the aesthetics of the work - initially they were going with a solid wall of light but I think this works much better.

Looks like it would have been super-cold... poor guys.
Jørn also made Skål which utilises RFID tags/readers (like what's in Snapper/Oyster cards and other ticketing systems) to let you "interact with digital media using physical objects". It's explained much better on the website, but essentially it is like the best kind of TV remote ever, in a kinda-pointless-but-I-do-want-it-anyway sort of way.


Also in my favourites was HC Gilje. He does some pretty interesting stuff with projectors: he even wrote his own program (VPT, which can be downloaded for free) in order to make his work more precise and simpler to create.
My favourite part of HC's work is this 'animation', which is in fact a static line of light: the movement comes from being inside the train that passes through the tunnel inside which it is mounted. The light makes reflections on the dark windows of the train as it passes through and creates a really stunning effect.

He also has a rather awesome work in the LUX exhibition, which is open to the public in the Engine Room at Massey from 12.00-4.00 Tuesday - Friday. I highly recommend going to see it. It's a very small exhibition but definitely worth going to see. I was going to upload some of the photos and videos I took of the pieces there but unfortunately all I had on me at the time was my cellphone camera, and even if the images were good quality I really can't figure out how to get them off my phone and on to the computer. So I'll go back in a couple of days and see if I can't take some better pictures.

More to come: some more of my favourites, and images and videos from the exhibition.