Client: Quartier des Spectacles

Location: Montreal, Qc, Canada

Completion date: 2015

Artwork budget: $215,000

Project Team

Client

Marie Lamoureux

CSDesign

Overview

Impulse is an interactive work comprised of seesaws of various sizes, with lighting and sound. The seesaws, fitted with LED lights and speakers, produce a series of beautiful sounds. The intensity of the light with the inclination of the seesaw.
The installation with its streamlined design and lighting effects fills the Place des Festivals with a dance of sounds and lights.With their motion and hypnotic rhythms, the architectural video echo the seesaws in the Place des Festivals. Playing with the ideas of equilibrium and motion, symmetry and asymmetry, tension and harmony, the projections are accompanied by original soundtracks

Goals

The Quartier des Spectacles Partnership is mandated to help maintain this strategic district’s liveliness year round by hosting activities in the Quartier’s public spaces. These productions are intended to complement the cultural offerings presented by the Partnership’s members and the area’s performance venues.
The Luminothérapie event is a major component of the Quartier’s free outdoor programming. It is an extension of the thinking behind the Quartier’s Luminous Pathway, the Quartier’s visual signature, in the form of twin rows of red dots projected on the ground to identify venues, along with architectural lighting and artistic video projections on several building façades. Presented in the heart of Quebec’s winter, Luminothérapie offers interactive and immersive experiences combining design, and digital art.
Launched in 2010, Luminothérapie goals are to give Montrealers and visitors an original winter experience in the Quartier, and to promote Montreal as a city of design, and to stimulate creativity in the disciplines of urban installations and digital art.
The primary work is designed to, with a day-and-night participatory work. Inspired by the space’s identity and Quebec’s fierce winters, the work, showcasing the Place des Festivals, gives the public a novel immersive experience focused on sound and light.

Process

Originally the brainchild of two offices, Lateral Office and CS Design, Impulse developed into a cross-disciplinary collaboration, drawing upon the expertise of structural engineers (EGP Group), industrial designers (Générique) and technology integrators (Robocut). Through extensive exchanges, from drawings to prototypes, the team came to a seamless solution where light plays a central role.

Additional Information

MUCH MORE THAN AN ENORMOUS PLAYGROUND…Beyond the playful aspect, each seesaw is also an urban sound device. The landscape is transformed by the sound and light emitted by the seesaws when people play on them. The result will always be different, depending the amount of people on site. The closer you get to the work and the more you play on the seesaws, the more you notice subtleties in the installation and details in the sound and light. Depending on the angle of view or the motion of the seesaws, people will see the light in different ways.