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Nuremberg Party Rally 'Cathedral of Light, Albert Speer 1936

Adolph Hitler used to have “light architecture” shows that also took place around the Victory Column. The shows were designed by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and were shown during Hitler’s annual party rallies.

Speer used 130 spotlights to create vertical beams of lights around his enormous Nuremberg stadium, which held tens of thousands of people at Hitler's annual party rallies.

The result was chilling, aptly described by Neville Henderson, then Britain's ambassador to Germany, as a “cathedral of ice.”

http://www.nuernberg.de/tourismus/rundgaenge/reichsparteitagsgelaende_e/e_lichtdom.html

The millennium event, Berlin, Gerd Hof, 2000

The millennium show, centered around the Victory Column monument in Tiergarten park, will consist of 250 high-powered floodlights casting beams of light 44 miles into the sky. It was designed by German artist Gerd Hof and will accompany a concert by musician Mike Oldfield.

Using 3.8 million watts of electricity and sending light 70 kilometers into the sky, it should be visible as far away as Dresden and Hamburg. A crew of 760 will work for five days to set it up, laying 70 kilometers of cable. Even on the site, the show looks impressive, but artist Gert Hof has in mind a different sort of drama for shortly before midnight. The plan is to have the Victory column, or Siegessäule, lit by 250,000 torches. “I wish to create a moment of silence,” Hof said. “Everybody should experience these first seconds of the new millennium in a peaceful and thoughtful manner, before the massive light cathedral will build up in the sky.”

Towers of light, New York

light : Verdiere+Paul Myoda; architects : John Bennet + Gustavo Bonevardi, 2001

…they build it http://www.spacecannon.it/company.asp?sezione=storia&lingua=english

Church of Light, Osaka by Tadao Ando

http://architecture.mit.edu/~barandon/4.203/overview_page.htm

BIX, media fasade for Kunsthaus Graz

authors: realities:united ; architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier

http://www.bix.at/

http://www.realities-united.de/

BIX is a field of approximately 900 standard, circular fluorescent light tubes which is integrated into the biomorphic facade structure of the new Kunsthaus, Graz(architects - spacelab.uk / Peter Cook (Archigram), Colin Fournier). All the lights can be controlled individually via a computer controlled data-bus system - i.e. the lights can be switched on and off and the light intensity can be changed at an infinite variability 25 times per second.

In this way the installation transforms the eastern main facade of the Kunsthaus into an approximately 45 meter wide and 20 meter high low-resolution gray scale display which is highly integrated into the complex double-curved facade structure.

Amodal Suspension, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

http://www.amodal.net/

will be a large-scale project designed specifically for the opening of the new YCAM center in Japan. People may send short text messages to each other using a cell phone or web browser connected to address www.amodal.net. However, rather than being sent directly, the messages will be encoded as unique sequences of flashes and sent to the sky with a network of 20 robotically-controlled searchlights. The signaling will be similar to Morse code or the flashing of fireflies, —the lights will modulate their intensity to represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, will be “suspended” in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed from one searchlight to another. An email will be sent to the intended recipient to notify him or her that “a message is waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi”. Each light sequence will continue to circulate until the recipient or somebody else “catches” the message and reads it. To catch a text, participants must again use the cell phone or computer programs provided at www.amodal.net.

Virtual Cage, Christian Moeller

http://www.christian-moeller.com/display.php?project_id=40&play=true

Sound space at TAT (Theater aam Turm), Frankfurt 2/93 and at the Tochoji Auditorium in Tokyo for “ARTLAB-Prospect2, 1997

The Virtual Cage installation consists of a completely darkened room of roughly 12 by 12 metres in size. An approximately 6 metre long ramp leads the visitor up onto a pneumatically sprung moving platform whose glass surface is designed to be walked on. Scanners which project the light of two 4-watt lasers horizontally into the room are fixed to diagonally opposite ends of the platform. As the platform inclines under the weight of the visitors, its slant is measured by optical sensors which transmit the data to the computer system, causing a swarm of particles to move through the room according to a gravitational pattern.

All samples used to represent the swarm acoustically were recorded from minute underwater insects. The observer hears the virtual swarm as a voice whose degree of detail varies with its distance.

Downlights, Christian Moeller

http://www.christian-moeller.com/display.php?project_id=24

Light Installation Centro Cultural Candido Mendes 2. Petrobras Exhibition of Virtual Reality, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 1999, Christian Moeller and Jytte Basler

The experimental nature of the installation consists in the way it plays with the positioning of the light source. The distance between stage actor and light source is thematized by reducing it to an absolute minimum.