TodaysArt — Genesis of Volume

United Visual Artists · 2006 · Interaction Design, Content Creation

Live visuals at TodaysArt and the genesis of UVA's Volume installation.

United Visual Artists created the lighting design for one of the venues at TodaysArt Festival, The Hague.

As part of UVA we performed live visuals for musicians such as The Orb, Akufen, Underground Resistance and Schneider TM. For the occasion Dave Green (now HIVE Media Control Ltd.) coded a visual module I envisioned and named “Rain Drops” — a precursor of one of the three looks of Volume. Rain Drops read the amplitude of the music across a grid of columns, dropping coloured marks at the points where the waveform crossed each one.

UVA’s large-scale installation Volume first appeared in the garden of London’s V&A museum in 2006 and has since travelled as far as Hong Kong, Taiwan, St. Petersburg and Melbourne. It consists of a field of 48 luminous, sound-emitting columns that respond to movement. Visitors weave a path through the sculpture, creating their own unique journey in light and music. Massive Attack curated the sound for Volume.

Rain Drops — the module I conceived: the amplitude of the sound read as a wave across a grid of columns.

At each column, the points where the waveform crosses are marked — the correlation points.

Those correlation points are isolated onto the columns.

Each becomes a mark whose position follows the amplitude.

The result: coloured drops running down the columns, driven by the music — a precursor of one of Volume's three looks.