video @ youtube

online version
 
Generative media installation, 2007.

Lichter

Fragile spots of light, flickering to life and in slow transition across the canvas. Structures emerge, evolve, grow out of themselves and disappear again. New lights grow out in their place. An ongoing convolution. Logic and yet so incidental. Seemingly arbitrary. But also very familiar. Meditative. Silent. The references are within you. You are not the other. You are where this piece takes place.

Artist statement

Lichter is intended to be a meditative installation, a visual flow where the spectator gets her own time and space for contemplation and introspection. My aim with Lichter is to share and to trigger. To trigger the individual spectator to make any individual sense of it. There is not a definite meaning that I intend to push - though I agree there might be an underlying subjective rhetoric. The rhetoric in this case might be regarding the existencialistic purpose of the piece. The generative of transient cycles are more of a fact. Or maybe this is the rhetoric.

Lichter is in essence a piece of software written in Java/Processing. It is running an ongoing and non-repeating generative where it iterates a self-regulating tree structure with hierarchical orders of nodes and their subtrees. Each node has links to its parent and to its child nodes, where the sub-structures generated are dependent of the nodes above in the tree. As node structures grow they have the ability to traverse higher up in the tree structure and gain independence. Though, as with everything, the structures also grow with a life span. Those subtrees able to sustain themselves traverse up in the tree and survive, while the dependent ones fail with their parent node. Each nodes is bound to a geographical location. When new nodes spawn they have a limited time to find themselves a new location to settle. If they fail, they will wither out and eventually die. If they succeed, that location will be their breeding ground for their own subtree.

The nodes, the subtrees and their cyclicity can be interpreted as an evolutionary process in a multitude of levels. They could represent any kind of multiplying entities, biological, bacteriological or otherwise. They could be a species; spreading, nesting and growing their mutual hides. But, they could also represent intellectual evolution, knowledge, concepts and ideas. They could be within the realm of cultural phenomenons, religion, dominant cultural influence or the cyclicity of contemporary subcultural activity.

Technical

At the spring exhibition at Valand School of Art in 2007, this piece was shown video projected from the ceiling to a structure of wood and textile on the floor. It can be shown in different ways depending on the space, though a dark and quiet setting is preferred. Programmed in Processing.