Waves are fascinating, says kinetic light artist Paul Friedlander, as he gestures to a light sculpture undulating in his studio. But the desire to conjure wave patterns in his work wasn't inspired by the sea, he tells WIRED.co.uk. Instead, Friedlander turned to cables and skipping ropes. "When you spin a skipping rope, you get this kind of volume around you," enthuses Friedlander. "And when you set a wave spinning on a string to generate these patterns, you know that that pattern can be either complex or simple."
Friedlander's kinetic light sculptures are made by shining white light onto a quickly spinning rope attached to two fixed points. Once set in motion, the rope becomes invisible, while the white light used by Friedlander and reflected off the rope flickers in a range of colours. "The light that I illuminate the rope with changes colour faster than the human eye can see," says Friedlander. "That means that when you're looking at one of these light sculptures, it's only being lit at any one instance in time by a single colour."
Human vision plays a significant role in how Friedlander's sculptures are perceived. "The curious thing about vision is that it is so slow. This slowness of vision turns out to be brilliant though, as if our vision was precise, we wouldn't be able to form an impression of what's going on with my chaotically moving wave forms in the way that we do," he notes. "All that we would see is a single line and the string would always be in one place."
Friedlander's interest in light sculpture was first sparked when he saw an exhibition of kinetic art at the Hayward Gallery. At the time he was an undergraduate student at Sussex University, studying physics and maths under Sir Anthony Legget, who went on to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on superfluidity.
The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery triggered both a desire to become an artist and to create his own light art. After finishing his undergraduate degree, Friedlander went on to study fine arts. Inspired by the likes of cybernetic artist Nicholas Schoffer, Friedlander initially started making small kinetic light sculptures on a shoestring budget, before eventually branching out into the wave sculptures he is known for today.
Friedlander codes everything for the software used to illuminate his sculptures from scratch. He reflects on how his relationship with technology has evolved over the years. "When I was at art college, I had a little dabble with programming. But in those days there were only mainframe computers, so it was very difficult to get your hands on the equipment," says Friedlander, who recalls the standard green and black display screens of the day. "What I thought was cool back them seems incredibly crude by today's standards," comments Friedlander. "All I could do was pre-choose a palette of colours and they were fixed, whereas now with the computer and the high power LEDs, I can change the colours in real time."
Displayed widely in museums such as the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the New York Hall of Science, Friedlander's kinetic light sculptures are both visually captivating and interactive. In some circumstances, viewers can use a touch screen to change the colours of the beams of light themselves.
Although Friedlander admits he is influenced by his knowledge of the sciences, he asserts that when he first became a light artist, it was an escape from his academic background. As a child of the space age, he recalls the excitement of seeing Sputnik's launch, and admits that he'd fancied being an astronaut.
These influences have no doubt seeped into his artistic vision. "I realise that the most scientific thing that I do is that I spend so much of my time writing code to illuminate my designs," he says. "I feel like my art is a spaceship for my imagination and I'm travelling to these unknown places. It relates back to what I said about the space age, and this dream of discovering mysterious, unknown worlds."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
