Credit: Rikard Österlund

Happy 2024!

As winter starts to show early signs of finally drawing to a close, picture the team installing the last outdoor winter works of the season in Aberdeen, reminiscing over all the rain we’ve seen in the last 5 months. Aah, good times…

Aberdeen Light Festival had both Submergence and Flow from the 8-11 February 2024.

Also still up, and worth a visit if you’re in London: Singularity at Battersea Power Station – part of an exhibition of seven outdoor works, curated by Light Art Collection, more details HERE. We’re particularly pleased with the way Singularity copes with its surroundings. If you haven’t been, Battersea Power Station is stunningly enormous – it is the 4th largest brick building in the world.We were understandably nervous that our ‘monumental’ work would appear like an illuminated pea next to this monster, but actually it seems very happy in its new surroundings. Rather than dominating the landscape as it usually does, it appears as an ephemeral focal point, its 1 tonne geodesic frame seeming delicate, light and fragile beside the monolithic Power Station. On show, and FREE to visit, until 25 February 2024.

Read more about it in our interview with Aesthetica here

Credit: Rikard Österlund

Another of our works currently on display here in the UK is a beautifully framed version ofWave, complete with a stunning stately home as backdrop and set within a CapabilityBrown-designed landscape.It is on show until 18th February. Unfortunately you’ll need to pay to see it – but if you’re interested, tickets are available HERE.

In addition to this, the following works are running:

Submergence (Vienna–tickets here)
Shoal (permanent install in Woodlands, near Houston TX)

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We’ve finally set up a mailing list! If you’d like to join it the link is below. We’ll only send out news every couple of months, but we’d love to tell you what we’re up to!

https://mailchi.mp/squidsoup/subscribe

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They said it couldn’t be done….Seems to be a bit of a recurring theme in our work.At the time we first built Submergence (2012), eyebrows were being raised at the idea of simultaneously controlling 32 DMX universes of RGB lights in real time. Not such a big thing these days of course (we recently used 240 at Ally Pally with Four Tet) but it was fairly rare territory back then.

Then we had the idea of decentralising the whole thing, so each point of light is an autonomous unit. We added sound to each point of light too, each one controlled by its own on-board wi-fi connected processor. Turns out connecting many hundreds of units in a small area over wi-fi is non-trivial too – we had to design them so they create their own ad-hoc mesh networks, connecting via parent nodes to the main network.The result, we call the system AudioWave, is at the basis of our Wave project (currently on show at Compton Verney).

This approach does have its advantages though. Despite the long R&D time, these systems become media canvases–the technological backbone of multiple works. The Submergence system is also used in Singularity, and AudioWave is also used in Murmuration, CircularEchoes, Shoal and Phase Shifter.

And we’re feeling on a bit of a roll at the moment, with several new variants and related works in the pipeline for (hopefully) 2024. Of which, more soon!

Happy 2024

Squidsoup xx