From a small idea to a life-size light installation
Blog 1 | Student Team IGNITE
During a light festival like GLOW, it is hard to imagine that people would forget the beauty of light. Yet, there is also a lot of light around us that goes unnoticed. For instance, we are always surrounded by the stars in the sky while you hardly see them through the lights of the city. With our new light installation SKYWAY, which is at GLOW this year, Team IGNITE wants to bring this to light and make visitors reflect.
Team IGNITE is a student lighting design studio focused on showing the social impact of light. To achieve this, we have set up a team of students with different backgrounds from various studies. In recent years, we have presented our project at GLOW to make people dance, move and meet each other through light. This year, our aim is to make people reflect together on the lights around them by showing the contrast between city and nature. Project SKYWAY is not only Team IGNITE's most ambitious work, but also a technical challenge. We are now entering new territory with a larger and more complex design.
Making a light installation of this kind is not exactly easy. In the beginning of our process, we focused a lot on experimenting with special materials and techniques to get ideas. For instance, we found a material that reflects light and by 3D printing we could mimic that in the shapes of buildings. Soon, the idea for a design that could show the top view of the city in the form of light emerged. But once that idea is complete, it also has to be realised, and that turned out to be a surprisingly big job.
Making something on such a large scale unfortunately also involves many concerns such as safety. The influence of the environment and materials also forced the team to change directions. The team therefore had to go through many iterations to arrive at a design that could actually stand at GLOW for a week. But the biggest problem ultimately turned out to be production at this scale. For example, because the 3D models took longer to make than expected, we had to use a whole bunch of 3D printers simultaneously for weeks to print all 250 parts. But cutting and machining 40 plates was also surprisingly time-intensive. By also calling on members outside the project team to help out during, for example, our Assembly nights, we managed to finish almost everything now.
After all the programming, sawing, painting, 3D printing and much more arranging, we now have just about everything finished to put together. This promises to be quite a job so we're facing some very busy final days. Fortunately, we are really looking forward to it because GLOW is almost here. Project SKYWAY is not to be missed during GLOW 2024, from 9 to 16 November behind the Beursgebouw!