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260-Laser Light Art Installation Hits Houston

Tundra's incredible immersive array of light and sound comes to Day for Night in Houston.
Images courtesy of Day for Night

Within the walls of a tall dark warehouse in Moscow, a large-scale art installation made up of 260 laser beams waxes and wanes to an ominous soundscape produced by Tundra, the Saint Petersburg arts collective responsible for massive, immersive media installations like My Whale. This gigantic grid of red lasers is called Outlines. It's the collective’s latest undertaking for Moscow’s Outline music and arts festival which was supposed to take place in June, but was abruptly canceled due to undisclosed circumstances. This weekend, however, Outlines will appear at Day for Night in Houston.

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Each laser in the installation is controlled individually via DMX controller. The choreographed laser show frames disparate patterns and movements within its dark gridded platform, which looks more or less like an actual space ship. The installation’s ambient soundtrack effectively controls the movement of the lasers, though sometimes the reverse occurs. A spokesperson for the artist collective tells The Creators Project that the collective tried to blur this relationship between sound and light so that the installation felt more organic. A laser grid comes with a lot of different associations, so Tundra worked to get rid of them by programing patterns and sound in a way that feels immersive and unique. “It's about everyone's individual perception of reality, their life background, circumstances, and social status, all this stuff creates fictional boundaries that aren't there actually; laser beams create a grid that is visible, but you can cross it if you want.”

Outlines will be featured at Day for Night in Houston.

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