Other work by… LAb[au]: ‘m0za1que’ – a kinetic light art installation

You’re saving digital data to computer memory all the time. Even at this moment, your computer is writing data about this website to its hard drive, your phone is storing text messages, your tablet is syncing your music library. But have you ever wondered what that operation looks like? How do the 1’s and 0’s that constitute your data flow to store that information?

LAb[au] makes this process visible in ‘Moza1que‘, a permanent artwork for ‘La Maison Mécatronique’ in Annecy-Le-Vieux, France. Watch a grid of squares form patterns by means of cellular automata, a programmed way for grid behaviour in which the tiles can either have a “on” or “off” status, just like the basic operation of a hard drive.

(There has been speculation that cellular automata may be able to model reality itself, which would mean that the entire universe itself could be viewed as a giant cellular automaton…)

The grid of tiles is lit by white light created by a combination of red, green and blue led light. When all tiles are up, or “off” they are coloured white. By changing the surfaces structure, the beams are disrupted and create colourful shadows, showing the diffraction of light and the flow of binary movement.

Due to the large scale of the artwork it is part of the spatial experience of the room. By taking part in our physical reality it is, besides a beautiful piece of architecture, a reminder of the working of light and computer processes taking place all around us.

At Coded Matter(s) #1: Unfolding Space, Els Vermang, a member of Lab[AU], will talk about this and other projects in which data and information is transformed in a spatial installations.