IDEA OF A HORSE

IDEA OF A HORSE | 2016

light sculpture

Cooperation with Billinger & Schulz

RESPONSIBILITIES

Concept, Programming, Physical Computing, Construction Development

TEAM

Alexander Kaschuba, Luna El-Arja, Amir Hazan

TOOLS

Processing, Arduino, Illustrator

Horses have been domesticated by human for centuries. This installation is the interpretation of a free, strong and majestic horse which owns the freedom of its appearance. Set up as a cooperation with the performance duo Billinger & Schulz we decided for a light installation related to the motion studies by Eadward Muybridge.

PROCESS

We set ourself the challenge to create a light sculpture, which shows movement in the most minimalistic way. The unreachable ideal would have been nothing more than light points placed in space. While developing this project, we used a simple system which was build in a big mass of 22 modules which resulted in a ca. 20m long installation.

MOTION STUDY

We were questioning how much it needs to recognise the motion of a horse.

LIGHTPOINTS

We oriented us on the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge to figure out the position of the points to recreate a ‹ point image › of the horse. The points were drawn in Illustrator and exported as XML-files, so we could read the exact positions in Processing.

PROPORTIONS

To get a feeling of the proportions and height, we developed a digital prototype in Processing which was then projected on a wall. This helped us to make a decision on the measurements of the installation: the height of the installation goes up to 1,8m which corresponds with the height of a grown horse.

BEHAVIOUR

Technical prototype to figure out the behaviour of the installation. Every LED represents one of the horses which lids up in space.

CONDUCTOR

We searched for a solution to use the thinnest aluminium tubes possible. We decided to use the tube itself as a conductor. So we just needed only one cable inside the tube, which allowed us to use an aluminium tube with a smaller diameter.

MODULARITY

We created two rows with each 11 modules. Every module represented a frame of the movement. Placed in a row they result to a path, the horses are running through.