Written by: admin Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 .
This past weekend, the MIT campus was aglow with light installations as the Festival of Art Science + Technology (FAST) came to an luminous end. The three-month festival, which kicked off in early February, was developed to showcase innovate work by MIT students and faculty that blends art and technology. Tod Machover, the Chair of FAST and an electronic music composer, explains in a video on the FAST webpage that, while MIT is well known for its achievements in science and technology, he wanted to remind the public of the important role the arts play in much of the school’s technical research.
The many events that took place during the festival were divided into different FAST categories: Opera, Past, Thinking, Future, Performances, and Light. It was the culminating event, FAST Light, that really caught our attention. Included in this portion of the festival were interactive light and art displays that will be of interest to anyone working in the entertainment design field, especially in event design.
One such display is an interactive art installation designed by architecture graduate students, Kaustuv De Biswas and Daniel Rosenberg. Maxwell’s Dream: Painting with Light is a translucent wall with magnetic handles attached to it and colored light sources behind it. As visitors manipulate the magnets attached to the wall, the disturbance in the magnetic field changes the intensity of color so that they are essentially painting with light. Not only do individuals change the appearance of the installation where they have touched it, but they collaborate with other visitors to alter the entire “painting.”
Maxwell's Dream: Painting with Light
The other two installations that we’d like to feature here were designed by Associate Professor of Architecture, J. Meejin Yoon. Both of these installations are light sculptures that gather information from their environment and use it to change their appearance. Wind Screen is a curtain of very small wind turbines that are also lanterns. As they catch the wind and begin to spin faster, the light increases in intensity. The result is that Wind Screen becomes a physical representation of the wind, an otherwise invisible phenomenon. While it is an interesting work visually, Yoon created this installation to demonstrate that harvesting wind energy doesn’t have to be accomplished only with monstrous turbines, but that with the right design it can also enhance our environment.
Wind Screen by Meejin Yoon
One of the highlights of this past weekend’s finale was Yoon’s Light Drift (pictured at top). This installation features glowing orbs both floating on the Charles River and placed alongside the river on Memorial Drive. The orbs on land are equipped with sensors that respond to a person’s movement and then relay that information via radio signal to the orbs in the river. As visitors move about and interact with the orbs on land, they see their activities reflected out on the river as changing patterns of light. This fun and playful installation encourages viewer collaboration in creating new combinations of light, as well as a new experience of one’s everyday surroundings.
This sampling of creative installations underscores the way in which interactive technologies are changing the field of entertainment design at the present moment. After viewing the innovative work on display at this festival, we can be certain that there will be no shortage of exciting projects to cover here anytime soon.
