Last December, at the Hotel de Region of Rhone-Alpes in Lyon, France, 150 LED rods dangled from the ceiling. At first they appear motionless, just a shining blue diamond suspended dozens of feet above the audience members’ heads. But give it a minute and you’ll begin to notice they move. Synchronized with music, the lights begin to undulate through space like a neon murmuring. Only instead of birds doing their dance, the motorized LEDs flicker and sway.
Bauder and Tetro transformed 50 floating triangles into an LED ballet.
This massive lighting installation, called GRID, was made for the Festival des Lumieres and is the creation of Tetro, a French design and production consultancy and and Christopher Bauder, founder of Whitevoid. Together, with the help of composer Robert Henke, Bauder and Tetro transformed 50 floating triangles into an LED ballet.
Our fascination with large-scale lighting installations is inherent, says Bauder, who is known for his large-scale kinetic lighting events. “Moving objects and animated light immediately trigger the natural curiosity of humans,” he explains. GRID, then, is tapping into our basic desire for motion and light and enhancing that with mesmerizing soundscapes to create an immersive audio-visual installation. “All our works very much depend on advanced technology,” he continues. “But what we are trying to achieve with those complex machines are immediate and unreflected human emotions.”
For GRID, Bauder suspended motorized LED-rods from a grid hooked to the ceiling that reaches more than 22 meters long. Live music from Robert Henke is synchronized to Bauder’s lighting and triggers the movements of the GRID. “Every sound and each bit of music composed by Robert correlates with a visual impulse and spatial alteration of the mechatronic display,” he explains.
This happens by interconnecting two computers with Ableton Live and Kinetic Lights Software, which communicate and rely on each other for prompts. Since both the music and the lighting is controlled live, there’s room for improvisation and last-minute creative changes. “I can change movement, color, and animation variables in real time without breaking the link to the musical score,” he says.
Though it’s the GRID that first catches your eye, Henke’s music is an indispensable part of the show. Just think about watching a horror movie; turn off the music, and you’ve essentially turned off the fear. “Sound can do this, shaping emotions in such ways that a moving set of colored lights starts to feel like a breathing organism or a huge archaic animal,” says Bauder. “Music stirs the emotions, while the mechanical movements and changes of light fascinate the eye.”
As the audience lies on its back staring up at the wavering triangular form, Bauder hopes that it puts our relationship with technology into perspective. “By doing so, it points to one of the major facts of modern life: Computers and machines became part of our natural environment,” he says. “Our reality is an interplay of nature and technology. Both are necessary; neither sufficient on its own.”Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.