Client
Location: London, United Kingdom
Completion date: 2023
Artwork budget: $120,000
Project Team
Artist/ Director
Alan Hayes
This is Loop
Artist/ Director
Harriet Lumby
This is Loop
Executive Producer
Katie Maddison
This is Loop
Producer/Artist
Sean Kerr
This is Loop
Audio Score Production
Sian O’Gorman
NYX: Electronic Drone Choir
Overview
‘Emergence’ an audio visual immersive journey.
A sanctum within which to consider the dynamic interplay between order and chaos and the momentous role this plays in systems.
Every decision, every idea and in fact every thought comes from this narrow region where the disarray of chaos and the regiment of order endlessly fold into and out of one another. Turbulent and ever changing permutations enabling an imperative blurring of the lines that fosters innovation, creativity, understanding and ‘being’ itself.
The structure consists of 75 large mirror nodes covered on all surfaces with a mirror finish and arranged into a 11ft tall, 30ft diameter cylindrical pavilion style structure with three entrances in a ‘Y’ formation, all of which are wheelchair accessible. The incorporated lighting is visible from inside and outside and displays a mesmerising program of highly complex light patterns choreographed to the accompanying audio track.
Goals
Emergence theory is a concept that suggests that complex systems and patterns arise from the interactions between simple individual components, rather than being directly attributable to those components themselves. In other words, emergence refers to the appearance of new and unexpected properties and behaviours at the level of a whole system that cannot be predicted by analysing the properties and behaviours of its individual parts.
We sought to create a large scale immersive tour-worthy light art installation that illustrates this theory in a sculptural audio visual medium. The inside of the individual mirrored nodes of the installation offer surprising and awe inspiring visual illusions that also culminate in an overall combined effect when viewed from a short distance thus creating the emergent system.
It was also important to us to make the artwork as inclusive as possible and as such all entrances are wheelchair accessible, the installation has an incorporated hearing loop system for the hard of hearing and we had a professional audio description of the piece made for the visually impaired.
Process
Emergence needed an audio track to act as a conduit between the technological nature of the structure and the humanity of the viewer. For this we collaborated with the NYX: Electronic Drone Choir to produce a track to our brief for the installation. The NYX use live electronics and extended vocal techniques to affect the human voice to create mesmerising and haunting audio scores.