and new blog address: http://www.oceanoflight.net/blog/posts/

Southampton Festival of Light, WestQuay, Southampton, February 10-19 2017. Commissioned by We Are The Fair.
12,064 individually addressable points of light.

Westferry Circus, Canary Wharf, London. January 16-27 2017.

More images here

Our new project, Bloom, is now live at Christmas at Kew, curated by the lovely people at Culture Creative.

A thousand spheres of light, each on a stalk and bobbing gently in the wind, fill a large clearing. The lights visualise waves of energy flowing across the space; acting in synchronicity, creating changes in ambience, choreographed patterns of light enveloping the space. The Garden comes alive in a bloom of energy and sound, acknowledging the depths of winter yet anticipating a still distant spring.

A symphony of 1000 voices

Bloom consists of around 1000 individual spherical units, each comprising a wi-fi enabled processor, GPS, accelerometer, LEDs and speaker. So the units know where they are, they can listen, respond and communicate. Together, they form a spatialised audiovisual symphony of 1000 synchronised and connected voices – a symphony made of the Internet of Things.

more details at www.squidsoup.org/bloom

Footage from the exhibition of Submergence (2016 version) at Usina del Arte, Buenos Aires. The piece was on show initially as part of Visual Art Week and Ciudad Emergente, but the exhibition was extended from one week to two months.

Final show period: 21 September to 20 November 2016.

More images here

Light Water Dark Sky, a new piece choreographed to Four Tet‘s enchanting Unicorn. Shown at Light Night Leeds, @LeedsDock, 6-8 October 2016.

It’s been a busy month, with new shows in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Pitlochry (Scotland) and Leeds (UK) – details below.

1// Enchanted Forest, Pitlochry

A wonderful opportunity to show a new commission, Aether, by the shores of a loch in Faskally Woods in Perthshire, Scotland. The piece was commissioned by Enchanted Forest as part of their annual illuminations. On show every evening from 29 September to 30 October.

UPDATE: Enchanted Forest is definitely worth a trip if you can get in, but tickets have apparently sold out.

2// Buenos Aires, Argentina.

An initial four day exhibition as part of Visual Arts Week BA and Ciudad Emergente has been extended to a two month run, showing in the main hall at the imposing Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires.

Opening times: Friday (10:00 – 20:00), Saturday and Sunday (13:00 – 21:00) until 20 November 2016 at Usina del Arte, Buenos Aires.

3// Light Night Leeds : Dark Water Light Sky

Leeds Dock and Light Night Leeds invited us to install a new work, to music by the always amazing Four Tet, on a floating pontoon in Leeds Dock. The Four Tet track is Unicorn, and we called the piece Dark Water Light Sky. Video coming soon.

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We also have upcoming events in Leicester (UK) as part of Europe’s largest Diwali festival (16-17 October), and a very different new work being premiered at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew (London UK) in November.

Very excited to be part of this year’s Leeds Light Night.

We have made a new work entitled Light Water Dark Sky, to music by Four Tet. The work is another volumetric light work, building on Submergence and Aeolian Light.

It runs Thursday – Saturday this week (7-7-8 October 2016) until 11pm, and will be on a floating pontoon IN Leeds Dock.

Do join us!!

Commissioned by Leeds Dock, inspired by an original commission by Quays Culture.

A brand new version of Submergence was premiered at this year’s SIGGRAPH in Anaheim, Los Angeles. We had a great position in the art gallery which, this year, was curated by Jonah Brucker Cohen, and also featured works by nine other digital artists working on the theme of ‘Digital Materialities‘.

The piece used our ‘Ocean of Light’ rendering engine (written in C++/oF, more details on that soon), combined with an infra-red laser scanner (also controlled using oF), a Beads-based generative audio system and synchronisation using a separate Processing app. The OoL engine, developed in part to work real time for VJ collaborations with Purity Ring and Four Tet, is now flexible enough to create a wide range of controlled volumetric effects, from form rendering to particle systems. Watch this space…

SIGGRAPH 2016, Anaheim Convention Centre, Anaheim, Los Angeles CA, USA. 24-27 July 2016.

Very happy to announce our latest project, Field, launched last week at the Wales Millenium Centre in Cardiff, commissioned by Welsh National Opera.

Field is an immersive artwork and memorial for 923 Royal Welch Fusiliers who died at the Battle of the Somme during the First World War and have no known grave. The piece was commissioned by Welsh National Opera to accompany their major new opera, In Parenthesis, by Iain Bell.

The 923 lights represent the many fallen fusiliers whose names are inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial in France. Some of these men would have served with ‘In Parenthesis’ author, David Jones, during the battle at Mametz Wood July 1916.

The work seeks to create an environment for remembrance and contemplation; one that connects the spiritual and elemental with the physical, the unseen with the seen, our past with our present.

Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff Bay, 13 May – 22 June 2016

#WNOField