Radio Telescope Sculpture Turns Movement into Light and Sound

Looking like futuristic alien technology FIELD's 'Spectra-3' turns movement into a stunning audiovisual spectacle.

January 15, 2016, 2:40pm

Lumiere London 2016 is in full swing, bringing with it various light installations to enhance the city's most famous locations. 30 artworks will be aglow this weekend at places like Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, Carnaby Street, Oxford Circus, King’s Cross, and many others. At the latter, digital studio FIELD—founded by Marcus Wendt and Vera-Maria Glahn—present their stunning sculpture, Spectra-3.

The piece is the latest instalment of their ongoing Spectra series, a merging of physical and virtual sculptures that take inspiration from space, technology, and our relationships to them, to provide elegant and sensory experiences using sound, light, and reflection.

Spectra-3's design and movement is inspired by the radio telescopes of the Very Large Array (VLA) located on the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. The piece combines computer-aided design with real-time input from the public's movements, to inform its physical actions as it rotates on motors, augmenting the space with the enchanting hues and patterns of reflected light and spatialized sound.

It's the biggest self-commissioned artwork the studio have ever done. Built from bespoke steel and surrounded by sensors, at nearly 10' tall, it's controlled by custom software which commands the motors, lights, haze, and multi-channel sound.

The Creators Project emailed a few questions to the studio to find out more about the concept and ideas behind the piece.

Photo: FIELD The Creators Project: How does the piece work? How do people's movement's translate into movement, light, and sound?

FIELD: Spectra-3 is an immersive audiovisual light experience: A physical-digital sculpture that tells three stories of communication through a choreography of movement, animated lights, and spatialized sound. Spectra-3 looks like a communication device, a technological artifact, that we’re bringing to life with a fluid choreography. This contrast of a technical, minimal form, and an almost human behavior, was one of the core ideas for Spectra-3 from the start. The show has three parts: Forever is Composed of Nows, Infinity and Latitude of Home, [and] I Look For You in Everyone. These titles were our guidelines for designing the choreography of movement, lights, and sound. Our aim is to create an immersive space that absorbs you, with an abstract narrative that viewers can enter and leave as they like. Whether you read it purely as a composition of form and light in motion, or as a poetic narrative about human communication and the longing to connect, that is up to the viewer.

Photo: James Medcraft

Can you explain a little about the aesthetic that inspired it? It's a 3m tall kinetic object with a mirror disc moving on two axes, surrounded by a grid of lights and sound. Spectra-3 purposefully looks like a communication device, using light as a signal in its attempts to connect with the world around itself. The form for Spectra-3 was inspired by radio telescopes, like the ones in the Very Large Array in the desert of New Mexico. Their huge, larger-than-life scale, and very functional movement is fascinating by itself. The phenomena they are gathering information about are on the very edge of our current understanding of the universe. Metaphors for this deeply human desire to explore the future, space and time, are at the core of the Spectra series, and also our wearable VR sculptures, Quasar, from 2015. Exploring the future and the unknown edges of our universe might be driven by the same, deeply human desire that makes us want to connect with each other.

Photo: James Medcraft

What are you looking to explore with the Spectra series and how does this sculpture fit in with the previous iterations? Making things come to life was one of the core ideas of FIELD from the beginning. We want to use the power of code to make visual art feel alive, to explore new aesthetics and visual languages, to create audiovisual immersive spaces with a sense of an abstract narrative. Over the years we’ve worked with everything from keyframed animation, to motion capture, emergent and procedural animation systems, physics simulation, to light, motion, and sound reactive animation.

In the last few years, our interest in the fusion of digital and physical systems has grown. We’re fascinated by sculpture as a medium—as a semi-time-based and abstract narrative medium, which interacts with its environment through light, perspective, etc. We’re approaching these new physical and sculptural projects with the same generative and code-based thinking that we’ve developed as our workflow over the years.

The pieces in the Spectra series, each in a different way, create an audiovisual immersive experience by connecting physical and digital elements: motor-controlled kinetic objects, reflective materials, light, projections and reflections, generative software systems, data inputs, and sound tracks composed in real-time. Together they all present very sensory experiences and tell very “human” narratives about communication and relationships.