Nils von Leesen
Laura Sudbrock
The light and sound installation “Suns Shine” in the Showroom of Havells Sylvania
The light and sound installation “sun shine” has been designed and developed for the Havells Sylvania Showroom in Frankfurt. The result was a light and space experience that offers an audiovisual sensation that is unexpected in this location.
The visitor enters an installation space through a light trap made of black curtains. It excludes all sound and light influences from the actual showroom. This anteroom provides two essential preconditions. First of all, the opaque curtain fabric fully eliminates the intake of stray light. Beyond that, the dark triangular porch with its black textile envelope creates an intentionally unfamiliar, almost strange spatial situation.
After entering through the second curtain, the visitor is now in a copper illuminated ambience with curved walls. Contrasting with the black ceiling and floor, the translucent copper gauze panels create an ellipsoid space-within-a-space situation.
The fabric panels pick up suspenseful visual light patterns and reflexes that result from “Stadium PRO” projectors by Havells-Sylvania, mounted behind the gauze.
As the visitor is advancing among the convex walls, the seemingly three-dimensional light effects emerge dependent upon the observer’s movement and viewing angle and thus change dramatically. The visitor is led to transform a passive observing process into an active self-induced experience when proceeding through the spatial setting.
In moving forward through the curved corridor, the visual excitement appears to intensify due to a decreasing spatial width, an intensifying brightness of the light sources and an ensuing more contrasting interplay of effects on the fabric. Moreover, the amount of projectors behind the gauze is enhanced towards the end of the corridor and the luminaires are aimed at the visitor’s faces.
This continuously increasing concentration of visual impact is abruptly dissolving when re-entering the anteroom which gives onto the office floor or leads back into the light installation. The experienced dramatic spatial impression is intensified by a sound backdrop that accompanies the visitors without forcing an interpretation of the contents onto them.