Probe anyone around you what they think LED lights are used for? Then answer will almost always be – “for decoration”. Be it Christmas or Diwali or Eid, fairy lights are a staple in every home, used to highlight the festive season. Especially on Diwali which is quite aptly nicknamed the “festival of lights”. No corner of the house is left in the shadows, bereft of the glow of these lights. But is that all these lights are good for? Here, the answer would be an emphatic ‘No’.
LED lights that react to bodily movements and generate moving portraits of their immediate surroundings, bursts of illumination that are choreographed to materialize unpredictably, tubes of fluorescent light arranged to form awe-inspiring sculptures – all examples of art installations made around the world that’ll put your next-door neighbour’s light shows to shame!
As a tribute to this auspicious festival season, TYS has dug up some world famous light artists who’re experts at manipulating light and creating masterpieces of LED art.
1. INCANDESCENT IDEAS
Unarguably one of the most acclaimed light sculptors in the world, Leo Villareal is known for blending light with computer code to produce breath-taking results. Leo’s artistic career started out when over two decades ago, he attended the widely attended event Burning Man (an annual week-long art event in Black Rock City, Nevada). It was an experience that changed his life and set him on the path that has seen him achieve great success and renown.
Over the length of his career, he has created numerous architectural marvels, each more complicated and larger than the other. His artworks are composed of multi-coloured or white incandescent, strobe, neon, or LED lights, whose dancing, pulsating, and waning is controlled by computer code that he writes himself.
Some of his most famous works are the “Multiverse”, a structure that includes 41,000 LED lights that envelops the 200 ft. walkway between the east and west buildings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, “Buckyball” that lit up New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 2012 and is now permanently installed at Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas and “Cosmos”, a tribute to late Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan at Cornell University campus. One of his most recent installations is “The Bay Lights”, which involves 25,000 LED lights that sparkle and shine across the relatively less known counterpart of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge.
“Mutiverse”
“Cosmos”
Leo Villareal and “The Bay Lights”
“Buckyball”
IMAGE COURTESY – LEO VILLAREAL
2. GALAXIES OF LIGHTS
Based in San Francisco, Jim Campbell has degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT. A fitting background for an artist whose transformative artworks create a bridge between art and computer technology. In today’s world, everyone is running after high resolution pictures, be it in our mobile phones or TV screens. The greater the resolution, the better. But not Jim Campbell. He prefers to translate his art in low resolution, so as to defy comprehension.
His most recent artworks involve pixelated representations created with LED grids, with an aim to explore the fine line between representation and the abstract. Through his installations, he wishes to show the human ability to interpret the information in front of them and to “fill in the gaps” as necessary. As such, everyone sees something different in his work, something that’s unique only to the viewer.
In 2010, Jim debuted his installation “Scattered Lights” in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, consisting of 1,600 sawed off light bulbs whose coils had been replaced with LEDs, which are energy efficient. He designed it in such a way that the LEDs received information from a control panel, which in turn takes footage of busy people rushing through the Grand Central Station, orchestrating the lights to create shadowy, moving figures.
A year later in 2011, his installed “Exploded Views” at the SFMOMA comprising of 1100 hanging LEDs, which appears to be a random cascade of lights at first but then transforms into human figures that seem to gain life magically!
“Scattered Lights”
“Scattered Lights” in Madison Square Garden, NYC
“Exploded Views”
IMAGE COURTESY – JIM CAMPBELL
3. WHEN GHOSTS COME TO LIFE
Finnish light painter Janne Parviainen, has been snapping photographs for over sixteen years. As seems to be the norm with all artists, Janne too discovered his calling as a light painter by accident. Back in 2007, he was out capturing long exposure shots at night when he bumped his camera. When he observed the unintentional shot he’d taken, he noticed that the street lights left streaks that appeared to form writing in the image.
Each piece of light painting takes up to 20 hours to be completed, either in Janne’s studio or at various Finnish landmarks. To start, Janne creates a base for his painting by drawing with white paint, chalk or charcoals on his black studio walls. Next, using a long exposure, he uses coloured LED lights to create bizarre and ghostly images. He moves around the studio, tracing all the surfaces with the LED light and sometimes the exposure times are up to 30 minutes to create such effect.
Speaking on his process, he says,
The light painting is executed when the studio is completely dark so I can light the correct parts of the drawings in the desired effect and to draw the characters with LED light while the camera is on long exposure. As you can imagine, working in pitch black conditions and drawing in the air can be a bit hard so I usually need quite a lot of takes before I’m happy with the result.
“Departure”
“Days Of Our Lives”
“Enjoy The Silence”
“Know Yourself”
IMAGE COURTESY – JANNE PARVIAINEN
4. NOCTURNAL SKELETONS
Dinosaur skeletons, human skeletons, giant neon animals, an eagle swooping in on a snake, nothing and no creature is left out from Los Angeles-based light painter Darren Pearson’s artworks. Talking about how he got fascinated with light panting, he says
My interest in light painting really started a couple years back when I saw the famous ‘Picasso Draws a Centaur’ photo where he’s light painting. The second I realized that you can draw within a photograph, that’s what turned the light on for me.
To create his paintings, Darren waits until evening or dusk and sets his camera on a tripod. He then uses long exposure – lasting from usually two to seven minutes – to take a picture. While the shutter is open, he jumps in front of the camera and paints with tools that resemble flashlights. The result is amazing imagery that tests the borders of reality and fantasy. Since he can’t see what he’s drawing, Darren usually starts from one point of the figure and works his way up, down or across as required. He adds,
I’ve got the system pretty down. I’ll do one mock-up just to double check the placement and to see if it looks okay and then I usually nail it on the second try.
The most challenging part of light painting photography according to him is, “finding a cool spot without ambient light or sketchy night-people. In Los Angeles, that’s a tall order!”
“Snake and Eagle”
“Allosaurus In The Fog”
“Sea Horse”
“Pirates”
While most public art installations that are made using LED lights are of temporary nature, not a single one fails to brighten up the day of its viewers. Just a single vision of these is enough to put a smile on your face and a twinkle in your eyes!
Be it by giving life to ghosts in a darkened room or by lighting up entire bridges, the above mentioned artists have shown that art has no boundaries. The only thing limits it, is our own imagination. So readers, do yourself a favour, flick that switch on and watch your world become awash with pure brilliance.
