Illuminating Cities: Explore Stunning Light Art

Berlin’s creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse just came up with a new urban intervention: They installed street lamp light switches in public space! And although that’s not suitable for the mass, it’s in my opinion a brilliant idea, especially for smaller neighbourhoods, parks or almost uninhabited urban areas… The Cheesecake Powerhouse was founded 2012 in Berlin by Chehad Abdallah, Eugenio Perazzo, Fabian Greitemann and Julian Stahl and usually operates in various design disciplines. Nevertheless, they work with people coming from all kinds of disciplinary backgrounds like video production, copywriting, strategy, skateboarding, graffiti or digital, what becomes visible in that recent street lamp light switch installation. So what’s next? ...

In one of the industrial harbours along the Rhine river, a light graffiti crew used the strange, dirty and old scenery to awake Gorillas! GorillaLighting is a light art crew from Germany who is not just projecting Gorilla faces onto facades, but also (probably inspired by Luzinterruptus) illuminating plants, recently for the Luminale festival in Frankfurt. Projected as light graffiti the gorilla portrait breathes nocturnal life into the unreal world. Huge fronts cry for attention. Grotesque steel giants wait for a character. ...

…and then we hit the streets. Phone booths, bus stops, news stands, subway entrances, the platforms of our transit systems, the insides of our trains, the walls of our city, the tops of our cabs, our buses, inside and out, carry private commercial messages to us as we moved through the city. All of these messages carry outdoor advertising to a captive audience, creating desires where there were none before, for products we scarcely need… ...

Light Art | As a part of the urban art festival “Street Lab”, the Berlin-based branch of the infamous Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) put up not just more than 350 LED throwies at Kottbusser Tor but also did a great blitzTag action at Moritzplatz! GRL Germany presents blitzTag, a brand new Laser Tag software, with a whole suite of new features. You are invited to as yet undisclosed location, to bomb urban space with massive light based graffiti. blitzTag is not meant to replace the grand tradition of physical graffiti, it is an alternative open source tool – for urban communication in the digital age. (GRL Germany) ...

Urban Light Art | Yeah I know, the results when art meets technology are often strange, but sometimes also groundbreaking and interesting. Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen recently showed that the Graffiti Research Lab is not the only agency which combines urban arts with technology by developing a four meters tall light art tool which makes WiFi visible! This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-meters long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting. (About the project) ...

Light Art | You know, I really like light artworks, because of their instability. After these beautiful light art performance photos I have again some light art today. Marko from France recently informed me about his amazing light-paintings he did earlier this year in Kazakhstan. He combines nice light patterns and typography influences, which looks really great. I hope to see some more of his work in the near future. What do you think? If you like these photos, go to Marko’s website and take a look at his other works! ...

Light Art | Already since 2007, the Bremen-based light art performance photography artists Jörg Miedza and Jan Wöllert are working together under the label of LAPP-Pro and I have to say that I unfortunately noticed them only a few days ago… Light art performance photography or short LAPP is, as LAPP-Pro defines, a “one-shot time bulb exposure photography, performed additionally with movement of light” and in that way similar to light graffiti, light drawing or light writing. ...

Today I found that amazing audio/visual facade projection by Griduo in collaboration with Due3! It took place at the santralistanbul Art and Culture Center’s Main Gallery building located in Istanbul some month ago: “It is a live audio/visual performance composed of animated monochrome geometrical shapes matching the real size and form of the quadrilateral alluminium modules which form the facade of the building. ...

Often, light-writing or light-graffiti is also described as traceless graffiti. There are several articles about that relative new art form, which combines the style and motion sequences from the traditional graffiti with the technical knowledge of photography, in my archives… One of the protagonists of light-writing in Berlin is Chris Noelle aka TOFA, who is visual jockey (VJ) in real life, initiator of the “Light-Write Festival”, which took place in Berlin in 2009, and responsible for the creative design at the well-known Tresor club in Berlin. ...

I don’t know whether you watched regularly the 2010 Winter Olympics - I do not. For this reason, I don’t realized that great light art spectacle: “Vectorial Elevation” was a light art project in Vancouver, which allowed people around the world to light up the sky over the former Olympic Games city with their own light shows. This was made possible by using 20 robotic searchlights located along English Bay. ...