Victoria students and staff to light up Wellington
Light installations designed by Victoria University of Wellington staff and students will light up Wellington’s waterfront and alleyways during this year’s Lux Light Festival.
PhD student Mo Zareei and recent graduate Jim Murphy from the University’s Sonic Engineering Lab have designed Θr, an audio-visual kinetic sculpture.
The sculpture consists of an array of motorised mirrors programmed to rotate synchronously with a pulsating musical track, casting beams of reflected light through a fog-filled space.
As artists who work primarily in the audio domain, Murphy says the pair was “interested in combining auditory and visual elements within a single installation context”.
Another audio-visual installation is Pulse, designed by Daniel K. Brown, associate dean from the Faculty of Architecture and Design, with music by Mark Johnson, a PhD student from Victoria’s Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music.
Pulse begins as a dense cluster of ripples that appear on the water below the Wellington Harbour wharf. Sound tones then trigger pulses in the form of concentric rings of light that move outward from the darkness and return inward again.
Johnson’s soundscape uses two cellos, a harp, violin and tympanum to create a melody generated from the number of syllables in the original Latin text of a Roman Catholic Prayer, Compline, of the Night Hours—prayers only recited in the hours of darkness.
Another PhD student from Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Thomas Voyce, worked in collaboration with international design organisation Philips Design to create audio content for their light installation, Aura.
Aura is a sound and light work that responds to an individual’s presence, becoming a visceral experience that is part musical instrument and part emotional response. It was co-designed by Paul Thursfield and former Victoria University student and tutor Simon Rycroft.
See Creature, a collaborative design-led research project led by senior lecturer and programme coordinator for the School of Architecture Mark Southcombe, also features in this year’s festival.
See Creature is a reptilian, muscular, large scale curved construction, with purpose-designed lighting that creates the illusion of movement.
Southcombe says “See Creature may evoke different things to different people. We hope that it comes to exist in the imaginations of the audience as an animate lifeform somewhere between a thing and a being.”
The ten-day festival begins tonight (21 August) along Wellington’s waterfront and surrounding areas. A map showing the location of festival exhibits can be found.