lights and electronics

HOP tests

Testing the hanging system of Cyborg Garden @HOP Woodshop, Dartmouth. With: Sam Golini

ILLUMINUS 2015 official trailer

ILLUMINUS 2015 Official Trailer from Illuminus Boston on Vimeo.

about ILLUMINUS

ILLUMINUS is a nighttime contemporary art event established in Boston’s SoWa Arts District in 2014 and taking place this year on Lansdowne Street. ILLUMINUS features installations and performances by artists who manipulate light, sound, and projection to create an immersive, multi-sensory spectacle. Locally-organized, ILLUMINUS is Boston’s contribution to the global “nuit blanche” movement established in Paris and taking place in cities around the world. Last year, ILLUMINUS attracted a crowd of over 10,000.

new photodotes @illuminus

Photodotes V: Cyborg Garden (known also as PhotoGarden)

An experiment between nature and technology, this cyborg hanging garden allows plants and artificial lights to co­exist and co­evolve based on people's movements. As visitors approach the installation, the light spectrum changes to enrich the energy provided to the plants' roots and to enliven the garage’s dark space. The installation makes viewers aware of the diversity of light we encounter in life: the lack of light, homogenous light in interior spaces, and over­lighted spaces

check PhotoGarden @Illuminus webiste

illuminus site visit

Skype tour @Lansdowne Garage (Fenway Boston)

ILLUMINUS: Nuit Blanche Boston from Materials & Methods on Vimeo.

More information about Illuminus [visit site]

upcoming chapter

Just finished my chapter draft  Architecture & Living Matter(s) for an anthology about biology in art and architecture. 

Zenovia Toloudi / Studio Z, Photodotes II: Light Garden @Photograph by Dominic Tschoepe

Zenovia Toloudi / Studio Z, Photodotes III: Plug-n-Plant @Photograph by Kristophe Diaz

About the chapter:
The chapter critiques the current disengagement from the "living" while presenting a series of provocative metabolic structures. By analysing materials and media technology, building systems, and events that relate to the metabolic, the chapter proposes directions of speculative metabolic art/architectural installations that can affect architecture and improve the lives of people. It eventually creates a language of patterns of the aesthetics of the metabolic.

About the book:

The anthology titled The Routledge Handbook to Biology in Art and Architecture (forthcoming fall 2016) is co-edited by Dr. Charissa Terranova and Meredith Tromble. This anthology brings together essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art, architecture, and design. They consider why, how, and under what circumstances artists, architects, and designers have integrated biology into their practices. The authors – artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians – connect biological thought past and present, on topics such as complex systems, epigenesis, ecology, evolution, and expanded mind, to the use of living materials in art, architecture, and design. This anthology surveys the emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its theoretical foundations. The hybrid art-and-science thinking it reviews newly articulates the relationship between science and culture to meet the burgeoning needs of programs of academic study and research integrating biology into art, architecture, and design.

lecture abstract

Architectural Apparatuses for Spatial Light

“Sealed” buildings and window-less working offices disconnect humans from natural light, pollute them with artificial light, and eventually disrupt their biological rhythms: Depression, insomnia, tiredness to name a few of the familiar problems of this “illegal” architecture. I propose a series of interventions that aim to provocatively express these problematic condition and spaces to advance quality of living. These architectural apparatuses are spatial elements (such as walls and horizontal surfaces, objects, and modular systems) that act as transmitors of natural light in dark spaces. Other times they are hybrid structures/gardens and edible structures that evolve in space. And other times playful micro-tectures that challenge perception, reveal immaterialities, and map the spatio-temporal changes.

beforelight

 

communal lighting installation from donated fixtures 
by beforelightlocated in the heart of athens, a small street within the monastiraki area is host to a lighting installation. by inviting users to donate their old luminaires, fixtures and lamp shades in order to transform the abandoned street of central athens into a homely space.

an abandoned shop was temporarily transformed into an open workspace for people to gather, observe and participate in the development of the project. a process of repairing, testing and waterproofing the lamps engaged volunteers that, in collaboration with greek creative studio beforelight, prepared more then 150 lamps to create a colorful ceiling over the street.

text (via designboom)
*project also appeared in made in greece plus exhibition at boston museum of science co-curated by b-z

body and light

Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals is a self-portrait in absentia.  The shapes of the neon tubes were molded against the contours of the artist’s body...

...Due to the sculpture’s popularity and fragility, the practice of fabricating replicas for temporary exhibitions was developed.  Loan agreements required potential borrowers to meet four criterion.  First, artist Bruce Nauman required that the original neon must be in existence and in working order.  Second, the current owner of the artwork must agree to the loan before a replica exhibition copy is fabricated. Third, the credit line for the loaned artwork would specify that the work on view is an exhibition copy and acknowledge the owner of the original.  The final criteria required the destruction of the copy at the conclusion of the exhibition.  Borrowers were asked to provide photographic documentation that the destruction had taken place.  

Excerpt from:  

The Conservation of Bruce Nauman’s Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body at Ten Inch Intervals (1966) via The Glass House

light fantastic

A viperfish is ready to attack a deep-sea shrimp. (Edith Widder, ORCA)

The ghostly outline of a Japanese firefly squid. (Michael Ready / Visuals Unlimited / Getty Images)

Atolla vanhoeffeni jellyfish. (Edith Widder, ORCA)

Periphylla jellyfish. (Edith Widder, ORCA)

Jellyfish glow with the flow in the Gulf of Maine and the Weddell Sea. (David Shale / NPL / Minden Pictures / Ingo Arndt / Minden Pictures)

A cockatoo squid from the Sea of Japan. (Dante Fenolio / Photo Researchers / Getty Images)

A deep-sea shrimp spews bioluminescent material to thwart a viperfish. (Edith Widder, ORCA)

Finally, the kraken is captured: Widder worked with scientists last summer to obtain the first video of a giant squid in the wild. (NHK / NEP / Discovery Channel / AP Images)

[via Smithsonian Magazine]

light pollution

100 number of times brighter an average city's night sky is than a natural one due to light pollution [Smithsonian Magazine, March 2013]

light & food

175 average reduction in calories consumed per person when fast-food restaurants use softer, more relaxed lights [Smithsonian Magazine, March 2013]

illuminating inequality

Satellite photo of Earth's artificial lights at night. (NASA)

This map shows the levels of poverty throughout the world.(Map by 5W Infographics. Map source by Earth Observation Group, NOAA National Geophysical Data )

Photos from: "A New Way to Illuminate Inequality Around the World" »

Satellite photos of Earth’s artificial lights at night form a luminescent landscape. But researcher Chris Elvidge of NOAA and colleagues from the University of Colorado and the University of Denver realized that they could also illuminate something much darker: the magnitude of human poverty. By comparing the amount of light in a particular area and its known population, they realized that they could infer the percentage of people who are able to afford electricity and the level of government spending on infrastructure development. This allowed them to extrapolate levels of human development—a measure of well-being that includes such factors as income, life expectancy and literacy.

Their Night Light Development Index (NLDI) uses a composite of cloudless night images taken by Air Force satellites. They found that the NLDI (below) measured human development with uncanny accuracy. The results closely correlated with conventional indices and in some cases even surpassed them. “The NLDI helps us get at the spatial patterns that you can’t see with traditional economic indices,” Elvidge says. “For instance, most nations report their GDP at the country or province level, but the NLDI can reveal subregional patterns, down to the one-kilometer scale.” The index also provides information on some countries, mostly in Northern Africa and the Middle East, for which reliable economic data are simply unavailable. 
This text is excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine [link] 

PHOTODOTES

Figure 01. Natural light collected at the roof. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 02. Artificial light source to be used when there is no sun.

Figure 03. Transferring light through fiberoptics. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 04. Transferring light through fiberoptics to be diffused in space. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 05. Transferring light through fiberoptics to be diffused in space. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 06. Detail from the light diffusion structure. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 07. Detail from the light diffusion structure. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 07. Light arrival. Photo credits: Dominic Tschoepe

Figure 08. Natural light arriving in darkness after traveling 100 feet from the roof.

PHOTODOTES: the making of

PHOTODOTES: the making of from Zenovia Toloudi on Vimeo.

photodotes: collect - transfer - diffuse

PHOTODOTES

PHOTODOTES, a ‘machinic’ installation, explores the manipulation of natural and artificial light in space, architectured to perform in 3 stages: collecting, transferring and emitting light. The experimentation discusses phenomena related to lack of light, like the lack of vitamin D, depression, women’s cycle patterns irregularities, and work separation from exterior conditions. By augmenting the individual and collective perceptual mechanism, PHOTODOTES emphasizes how light’s relation to energy and the survival leads to well-being of people.

*PHOTODOTES is the plural form of the greek: φωτοδότης = giver of light, luminary

Project credits:
Design: Zenovia Toloudi
Research: Zenovia Toloudi, Ute Meta Bauer (MIT Art, Culture, and Technology), George Toloudis
Construction: Zenovia Toloudi, George Toloudis, Panagiotis Stamboulidis @ Stamboulidis Panagiotis Workshop in Alexandroupolis, Greece
Gallery Installation: Zenovia Toloudi, Dominic Tschoepe, Dimitris Papanikolaou
Special thanks to: Maria Toloudi, Yannis Stratakis, Theodoros Koukos, Marrikka Trotter, Jonathan Santos, Evelyn Rytz

lightballet

Lightballet by Otto Piene now @ LIST MIT (photos found through LIST)

56 experimental light-machines

These are the 56 light-machines we have created in the zitofos workshop at Alexandroupolis this summer. The work I will be showing at MassArt is based on these experimentations and the research I do at MIT Art, Culture, + Technology. Stay tuned!

MCUS light experiment: 24h

start:

next photo: 12:07 [noon]

next photo: 14:42

next photo: 16:32

next photo: 16:55

next photo: 17:53

next photo: 20:35

next photo: 01:33

next photo: 01:35 [fully dark]


The MCUS light experiment started at 4pm on Monday July 18th and ended at 4pm on Tuesday next day.The experiment took part in a cycle of 24h at DZLAB indoors, having mostly indirect sunlight during the day and some artificial light during the night. I took a photo of MCUS every approximately half an hour in order to map out the different light and shadows conditions.
I selected the most representative "extreme" scenarios that depict the changes. For this blog post, I presented them from morning to night sequence, instead of [Monday] afternoon to [Tuesday] afternoon. MCUS leaves would harvest energy from the sun during the day [even without being directly exposed to sunlight] and would produce it as light back to the space at night.
Next experimentation on MCUS and light would be in a larger [in terms of number of leaves] instance of MCUS at direct sunlight.
Stay tuned.