SUBTITLESixty light objects in fog, lit by frequency analysis of thunder.
2018
RELEASE
MEDIUM
Site-specific audiovisual installation comprising 60 custom-built light objects made from LED lamps and LED modules suspended on metal cables, automated haze, two-channel sound, and a real-time audio-reactive lighting system built in TouchDesigner using DMX/Art-Net.
SHOWN
The two audio channels are analysed independently. Frequency data is processed through a custom mapping system, manually calibrated by the artist, and distributed across the 60 light objects.
DIMENSIONS
Variable — documented installation approximately 8 × 28 m
RECORD
PS/PROJECT/STORM-CLOUD/V01
REGISTER
OPENCORESOURCEDRY
NOT IN THE RECORD
COLOUR · LOCATED · STATE · PROTOTYPE
01 / WORKLIGHT · SOUND · HAZE
DOC01 / Figure in hazeENLARGE ↗
SOUND⟶LIGHT
“Storm Cloud” is an immersive installation that explores the dynamics of the event and its constitutive role in the production of reality. 60 light objects, regularly arranged in space, are immersed in fog, creating an initially unclear, fluid environment. This environment comes to life and takes shape only in the moments of flashes of light generated by a sound analysis algorithm.
STORM CLOUD
02
Inversion
The key conceptual move of the installation is the inversion of the usual causality. While our everyday experience suggests that thunder is a consequence of lightning, here the sound itself becomes the cause and trigger of light effects. The peals of thunder are subjected to frequency analysis and divided into 60 ranges, each of which is associated with a specific light object. The intensity of the glow is modulated by the intensity of the sound in the corresponding frequency range.
DOC02 / Two visitorsENLARGE ↗DOC03 / Light objectsENLARGE ↗
Thus, “Storm Cloud” problematizes our entrenched perceptual and cognitive schemes, challenging the “natural attitude” of consciousness. It highlights the conventionality and constructedness of the very parameters of our perception of reality. The flashes of light in the fog become a kind of “indexes” of the invisible soundscape, its three-dimensional photograph. Reality appears here not as something predetermined and static, but as a process, each time re-constituted in the event.
03
The event
This focus on the eventful nature of reality refers to the ideas of Heraclitus, as interpreted by Heidegger. “All things are pastured by lightning” — this thesis finds literal embodiment in “Storm Cloud”. Lightning here is not just a physical phenomenon, but a metaphor for the event itself, interrupting the horizon of the present and opening up the space of the other. Only in the moment of the flash does reality become visible, articulated as reality. Without the event, the world remains indistinguishable in its potentiality, dissolved in the fog.
FROM THE ARTIST’S TEXT“All things are pastured by lightning.”
DOC08 / Illuminated fieldENLARGE ↗
Only in the moment of the flash does reality become visible, articulated as reality.
04
Expanded field
At the same time, the installation enters into a dialogue with the tradition of land art and specifically with Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field”, read through the optics of Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field”. But while classical land art worked with large-scale natural spaces, transforming them with the means of minimalist aesthetics, “Storm Cloud” shifts the focus to the environment itself as a space of possibility for events. The expanded field here is no longer a physical territory, but a zone of potentiality, actualized through a series of singular flashes-differences.
This transformation of land art aesthetics resonates with the concept of the “technological sublime” developed by Jean-François Lyotard. If the classical sublime was associated with a sense of human insignificance in the face of majestic nature, the technological sublime arises from the impossibility of conceiving and representing the super-complexity of technical systems and processes. “Storm Cloud”, with its algorithmic generation of light patterns, becomes a metaphor for this opaque and non-human-scale technological environment.
But the installation goes beyond simply thematizing the technological sublime. By immersing the viewer in a space of unpredictable light events, it induces a special affective experience — an experience of disorientation, loss of cognitive control, confrontation with the radically other. This experience, in turn, carries an emancipatory potential. It invites a different way of co-existing with the world — no longer through mastery and control, but through openness and vulnerability in the face of the event.
FROM THE ARTIST’S TEXT / P07“through openness and vulnerability in the face of the event.”
05
System
Site-specific audiovisual installation comprising 60 custom-built light objects made from LED lamps and LED modules suspended on metal cables, automated haze, two-channel sound, and a real-time audio-reactive lighting system built in TouchDesigner using DMX/Art-Net.
The two audio channels are analysed independently. Frequency data is processed through a custom mapping system, manually calibrated by the artist, and distributed across the 60 light objects.
SIGNAL PATH
INPUTTwo-channel soundL + R
→
ANALYSISIndependent frequency analysisLeft / Right
