You might have been to Chicago, and you might have seen Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. But you’ve never seen Cloud Gate in Chicago like this before…
Luftwerk is the firm who designed and coordinated this work — a husband/wife team of Sean Gallero and Petra Bachmaier. From Frame Mag’s website:
Luminous Field comprises of 10 video projectors mounted on four towers; the projectors are pointed onto and below Cloud Gate, a giant bean-shaped sculpture built by Anish Kapoor in 2006.
A series of 5-minute-long video shows play on a loop, covering the sculpture and its surrounding territory (about 25-by-9m). Videos range from a funky disco dance floor to colourful geometric patterns.
‘We really perceive it as something that people can interact with,’ says Petra Bachmaier, who forms Luftwerk alongside husband Sean Gallero. ‘We really want people to go in and play with it. Like the whole concept of the video, we built it for people to move with the light.’
The result is a virtual ‘playground’ for people to follow and engage with light. Meanwhile, a special music soundtrack plays, as composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion.
From Luftwerk’s website:
Inspired and informed by Italian floor mosaics, the urban grid, pedestrian crosswalks and geometric tessellations.
“If anything could possibly top the interactive experience of Anish Kapoor’s monumental Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park – then this could be it. This stunning site-specific video and sound installation brought more than 65,000 Chicagoans and out-of-town visitors to the Park over a ten day period in the middle of the winter. Luminous Field by Luftwerk became a viral sensation and photos of the beautiful lights and geometrical forms that enveloped ‘the Bean’ were seen throughout the world.” – Dorothy Coyle, Executive Director – Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture
“Playground” projection field dimension 80′ by 30′ consisting of 384 tiles, underneath projection reflecting within the sculpture.
This piece of mastery of light closed February 20 — but if you saw it, please drop a comment below and give me the skinny!
