Tag Archives: Installation

Kinetic chandelier “blossoms” open like a pine-cone to fill your room with beams of light

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Chandeliers, unlike lamps, serve an important dual purpose. Their job isn’t just to fill a room with light, it’s to form a mesmeric illuminated art-piece often located in the center of a hall for people to admire. The Core chandelier by Hsin Lee does it pretty well, with a design inspired by the appearance and the ‘maturing’ of a pine cone. Multiple copper leaves on the Core chandelier are connected to a central mechanism that gets the chandelier to open up, filling the room with soft beams of light that dance around as the Core opens and shuts. The shimmering copper leaves create their own shimmering reflections too, turning the chandelier into an instant attraction that is difficult to take your eyes off of.

The Core currently sits in Kawabata Intcraft, an 84-year-old Japanese-style art club. It hangs on a high ceiling directly above the spiral staircase, prompting the viewer to look at it as they climb up. Its gradual opening and closing action also brings the space to life, making it look as if it’s breathing.

The kinetic sculpture relies on multiple moving parts assembled together. Designed to be just about as intricate as an umbrella, the Core’s insides sit within its copper shell, and aren’t immediately visible to the viewer. They work almost in the background as the copper petals sit around them like an exoskeleton, and the moving petals cast a kaleidoscope of light beams and fragments, keeping the eye occupied. Core is made out of 87 unique brass pieces, relying heavily on precise mechanical engineering. Each part is detailed crafted in collaboration with a self-made CNC machine to bring the experience to life.

“The purpose of this project is to study the relationship between artistic sculpture and historical building”, says designer Hsin Lee. After learning that instead of demolishing the 84-year old Kawabata Intcraft building (which was previously a police station), it was in fact, being preserved as an art club, Lee “hoped to bring it back to life in an artistic way. The concept and name Core was born accordingly, in the shape of a pine cone to resembles eternity”.

The Core kinetic chandelier is a Bronze Winner of the A’ Design Award for the year 2021.

Designer: Hsin Lee

This kinetic sculpture encompasses a mother and child’s bond – Watch the video!

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The Bruno’s Swing is a tribute to and a celebration of the joys of motherhood! Designed by Federica Sala after the birth of her son, the swing practically becomes a kinetic sculpture and an icon of the love a mother has for her child.

“I had recently stopped swinging Bruno in my arms because he had become too heavy, but I still had that feeling: it was a wonderful sensation and I wanted to keep it”, says Federica. With Bruno’s Swing, the child sits within a heart-shaped seat, suspended from a bent-metal frame that’s styled to look like a mother. When the child swings, it almost looks as if the heart is beating with the child within it, creating a wonderful metaphor for motherly love! “It is difficult to keep the sensations: at the moment they seem unforgettable, but then many others come along and it is difficult to feel them again. This work is for Bruno to enjoy, but it is above all a ‘memorandum’ for me of this moment in which I felt like that, a strong woman, very close to her son, very much alive, with a heart that was pounding for this union.”

Being an only child, I have grown up being the only one who received all the attention from my parents. So I’m sure this sentiment is echoed heavily in my mother’s heart – the constant tug of war to hold onto her child tight and catch those moments before I grow up.

Designer: Federica Sala of Geometrie da Compagnia

These ‘melting’ mirrors add a surreal Dali-inspired touch to your interior spaces!

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While the Melt Mirrors aren’t exactly functional enough to really be the kind of mirrors you’d use to check your outfit or fix your hair, they use mirrors to provide a unique effect on plain walls. The curved, almost fabric-esque mirrors hang on your wall like a curtain or towel hangs on a hook, creating an interesting effect by looking like a portal into another dimension. These mirrors ‘drape’ themselves on wooden dowels and instantly turn blank walls into conversational elements.

The mirrors explore “reality vs. perception” through material as well as through form. They come in four shape variants, and are available across multiple glass-colors, including Clear, Bronze, Peach, and Black-tinted glass options. The wooden dowels come in dark walnut and light oak wood options too, really helping customize your ‘melting mirror’ to suit your space. Perfect for indoor as well as outdoor use, the mirrors are best placed on a plain wall, facing a dramatic arrangement like a rug, planter, pool, or the skies. That allows them to reflect what’s in front of them, instantly turning your boring wall into something more attractive and surrealist!

Designer: Bower Studios

Endlessly modular smart LED panels turn your walls into dynamic light installations!

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The year is 2021 and wallpaper has just been rendered obsolete. Meet the Nanoleaf Shapes, a series of slim, smart LED panels that come in geometric shapes and can be connected to one another to create a dynamic work of art on your walls. The modular panels can be used to create shapes, patterns, textures, even text, and they add a touch of color to spaces when off, but completely transform the ambiance of a room when switched on!

The Nanoleaf Shapes are infinitely customizable, like a jigsaw puzzle with no real end-goal. You can create the shape or graphic that you want, and the smart LED panels do the rest of the work. The panels can light up in as many as 16 million different colors, and can be customized within their smartphone app. The LayoutDetect™ feature allows the individual LED panels to identify the shape and layout of your design, and enables them to work in tandem with each other, behaving as a singular lighting unit. Once connected, you an use the panels as mere ambient lights, although they’re capable of much more. The smart LED panels work via touch, and can instantly be transformed into an interactive installation that changes hues when you touch any of the panels. Alternatively, they can connect to your smart speaker and change colors to the rhythm of the music you play, or better still, connect them to a television and activate the Match mode to make them light up with hues from your screen, turning your wall green when you watch a football match, blue when you watch an ocean documentary, or dynamically shift colors as you watch a movie! Your walls and room will never look dull again! And with 16 million colors to choose from, they definitely shouldn’t!

Designer: Nanoleaf Shapes

This eccentric looking armchair interprets furniture as a postmodern art-piece!

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The Varier Ekstrem was built to evoke a reaction. Now it doesn’t matter what reaction it is as long as it’s extreme (as the chair’s name suggests), but I’m guessing designer Terje Ekstrøm is going for a combination of shock-value and absolute delight, because as eccentric as the Ekstrem armchair looks, it surely looks hypnotic too!

The Ekstrem comes with an incredibly bold-looking silhouette, thanks to its pipe-shaped design. The chair distills the seating experience to its most basic form, and then exaggerates it with thick cushioned columns that curve and intersect to create a seat that’s still comfortable to sit on. The armchair comes with a backrest and a seat, each created by four pipe-columns merging together. The pipes then branch out, becoming either the armrests, or the legs of the chair, creating something that’s absurd to look at, but something you’ll undeniably want to sit on!

Each chair comes with an internal stainless steel frame, covered with PU foam, giving the chair its soft appeal. The foam members are individually upholstered with a bespoke woven woolen fabric, giving it breathability along with elasticity that allows the fabric weave to naturally stretch when you sit on it. The chair comes in six Pantone color variants, ranging from the classic black and light Gray Violet, to more vibrant options like Shaded Spruce, Port (maroon), Sulphur (yellow), and Bridge Orange.

Designer: Terje Ekstrøm for Varier

Varier Ekstrem Extrem Slangenstoel

ASMR becomes a brain tingling art form in a new exhibition

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Once thought to be a figment of our collective imagination, ASMR (or autonomous sensory meridian response) has taken YouTube by storm. It can be created by sights and sounds ranging from beautiful music to whispering to the clipping of hair, and caus...

Look closely, this rack of speakers is actually a mechanized drum-kit!

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Maverick creator Love Hultén is turning drumming into a visual art form of sorts! Slagwerk-101 is an audiovisual sculpture that uses a series of percussive instruments and turns them into a physical interpretation of a digital drum-machine. By simply mounting sticks on, which are actuated using a signal board that reads MIDI signals and converts them into real beats, Slagwerk-101 is perhaps one of the most tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the words Electronic Dance Music.

The setup involves individual instrument units that come together in a modular setup. This modular nature allows Slagwerk 101 to expand or contract, and be laid out in a variety of different ways. The individual drum modules include everything from kick drums, to snares, toms, and hi-hats, to even some unusual ones, like the tambourine, a pair of hands (they’re wooden), and a Saturday Night Live classic, the cowbell. Sticks are attached to electromagnetic solenoids, and can be plugged right into individual modules using quarter-inch jacks, and can be routed to the signal board, which translates beats playing from a connected laptop. The result is a set up worth geeking out over. The laptop sends beats to the drum-kit, which play the loops back in real-time with stunning response time… Professor Terence Fletcher from the movie Whiplash would be pretty proud of this machine’s tempo.

Designer: Love Hultén

Watch as this large crystal-like installation turns Tokyo’s landscape into kaleidoscopic art

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Looking almost like a ripple in time and space, Vincent Leroy’s Illusion Lens bends light in a way that makes you double-take. The illusory installation, which has found its way on the terrace of a building in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills, is a geodesic structure, comprising multiple fresnel lenses (flat lenses with multiple spherical rings).

Sitting at the very center of a helipad on Mori Tower, in one of Tokyo’s most affluent districts, the Illusion Lens bends looks like a literal jewel, as it bends light in ways that make everything around it appear as fragments inside it, combining the cityscape as well as the sky above. ‘Far from the noise and activity of the Japanese megapole it is an incredible place for contemplation. it’s the best place to be close the clouds of Tokyo’, says Vincent. It rotates ever so gently throughout the day, refracting, reflecting, and remixing, like a massive kaleidoscope.

The fresnel lenses (originally designed to help lighthouse beams propagate further) are joined together without any seams to form a seamless buckyball that makes the installation look like a cut, clear jewel. In the day, it becomes a place of contemplation and reflection, as clouds, skies, and buildings merge together in a symphony of polygons, and at night, the artpiece comes alive with a thousand reflections of the city’s lights.

Designer: Vincent Leroy

The North Face’s high-tech Futurelight jackets are finally here

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When The North Face teased its new Futurelight fabric earlier this year, it claimed to have created its most breathable waterproof gear yet. It uses a proprietary nanospinning technology that lets air move through fabric easily and according to the c...