Edge of the Universe
As part of the 2018 LUX Light Festival, a cascade of letters falling into the sea was temporarily installed along the Wellington waterfront, exploring the theme of being on the edge.
Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, Daniel Brown created an installation in the LUX Light Festival called Edge of the Universe. Letters of light tumbled onto the sea and rose again like the tide, forming excerpts from New Zealand writers’ work included in the Wellington Writer’s Walk. The accompanying musical soundscape was composed directly from the rhythms of the words by recent New Zealand School of Music (Te Koki) PhD graduate and musician Mark Johnson.
The installation explored the theme of being on the edge, and sat on the waterfront right between land and sea, subject to the ebb and flow of the tide. The excerpts themselves were rearranged to create a “new, bold theme that engaged all poets at the same time and told a story about taking risks, learning from mistakes, making a difference, seeing the light within the darkness, and gaining wisdom over time,” says Professor Brown. The use of New Zealand writing grounded the piece firmly in Aotearoa, a country very conscious of its own position at the edge of the world, Professor Brown says.
Mark composed the soundscape by analysing the structures of the excerpts and coding them to create a melody that came directly from the words themselves. The number of syllables, where the stresses fall, and the length of the phrases determined the musical notes and their duration. This approach to using structural aspects of texts to create rules and sets of parameters for composing music, rather than treating the words like lyrics in a song, is an algorithmic-based composition style that was one of the main focuses of his PhD dissertation last year.
Professor Brown says installations like Edge of the Universe blur the boundaries of art and architecture, which is how he views his work. He has prepared installations for several cities across the world, including Rome, Venice, and New York, many of which have explored similar themes of temporality and identity. “I take an urban public environment that’s under-utilised and allow art to infiltrate, returning the space to the public and giving it an identity. All my works have political statements.”
The connection between art and architecture is central to Professor Brown’s approach to teaching. He encourages all his students to read, watch films, and listen to music. Like these, “architecture is also a storytelling device – if you can see how one medium translated an idea, you can think about how that might be translated by architecture. It can transform a building into a work of architecture.”