Lights On Tampa 2015 is about connection: Connecting people to place, place to the arts, the arts to people. Art and technology are both avenues in which many things travel. Both are direct extensions of what we are and where are as a city. Recognizing that culture and innovation emerges from the community, Lights On provides a foundation for exploration of ideas and put them in the spotlight. The 2015 event was taking place two consecutive nights: February 20th and Saturday, February 21st, 2015 from 6:00 – 11:00 p.m.

Lights on Tampa 2015 participating artists include: Nick Cave, Wannemacher Jensen Architects, Creative Movement Company, Silvia Curbelo, Urban Conga, Luftwerk

Luftwerk presents Recurrence – a light art installation that evokes the tidal flow of the Hillsborough River through programmable kinetic LEDs. This elegant artwork was comprised of a grid of lights that flowed in a compressed rhythm to the tides of the Hillsborough River.

January 28 – February 22, 2015
Reception with Sculptural Performance: Friday, January 30, 7-9 pm

Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday 11am – 4 pm,
Saturday and Sunday 1-3 pm, Closed Monday and Tuesday

The Fosdick-Nelson Gallery is proud to present a performance installation created by D. Chase Angier of Angier Performance Works, in collaboration with Luftwerk, The Tiffany Mills Company, Kristi Spessard, Laurel Jay Carpenter, The Alfred Performers, Andrew Deutsch, John Laprade and Marketa Fantova. Each week is a new experience, intricately interweaving 8,000 pounds of rice, evocative movement and sensuous designs into slowly shifting landscapes.

Over the course of the exhibition, the installation will change and new performances will take place in the gallery each week. See below for performance times and special events accompanying the exhibition. All events are free and open to the public.

As the Air Moves Back From You is made possible through generous contributions from: New York State Council of the Arts, The Artist in Community Grant funded by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature administered by the Cattaraugus County Arts Council, private donations and the following programs within Alfred University: Marlin Miller Dance Residency Program, Miller Endowment for Excellence in the Arts, School of Art and Design, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Institute for Electronic Arts, Electronic Integrated Arts, Herrick Gallman Fund and Division of Performing Arts.

iea blog post

What do you do with a revered masterwork of the 20th century? Luftwerk casts INsite, as “an exploration of the philosophy of Mies through light.” The results are revelatory, reanimating our understanding and appreciation of this iconic structure.

INsite is a looping composition divided into three sections roughly corresponding to the structure of the house, the fluidity of its transparent glass walls, and the organic, where nature meets geometry. Luftwerk uses  projection mapping, especially in the first movement, to highlight the horizontal structural steel beams that enable the glass walls to enclose the volume of the space with such an ethereal mass. Subsequent projections of abstracted patterns are like an artist’s MRI of the interior volume of Farnsworth, flooding it with images of fluidity created in their studio in a playful but systematic topographic investigation. In the last movement, color enters in and nature is projected within the volume of the house. Dappled sense memories from the daytime meld with the structural outline of the house, transforming it.

In a sense there are two Farnsworth Houses. There is the one that most people get to experience during the day, and there is Farnsworth at night. During the day, Farnsworth hovers above the grassy landscape and the glass walls provide a transparent view that is also subtly hermetic. Even though there is no visual barrier, interior and exterior are sealed off from one another. You are in nature but not necessarily “amongst” it.

At night, Luftwerk’s projections literalize the hover quality of the structure, highlighting the horizontal steel beams supporting the house but virtually eliminating through absence of illumination any connection to the ground. The house becomes unmoored. From the inside there is an epidermal transformation. The glass skin becomes reflective and the space expands fractally toward the indefinite. But beyond the glow of refracted light there is no landscape, no nature, only a primeval dark.

There is a story here, and it is one that Luftwerk wants you to experience not be told. If you could bottle the daytime Farnsworth, the magical feeling we all have as we walk around it, viewing from different angles, inside and out, and project it back on itself at night, without the “distraction” of the landscaping or the furniture – or the history – what would the house look like? How would it feel? The dots and squares and pixels are abstracted patterns of sunlight through the leaves of the overhanging trees and sunlight on water, referencing the nearby Fox River, the viscosity of glass, and the flow of time. What is Farnsworth now?

There is one other critical element to Luftwerk’s illuminating exploration of the philosophy of Mies, and it is the musical score of Owen Clay Condon. Condon uses a number of different instruments in his own sonic exploration of Farnsworth, but the key is his use of B as the resonant frequency of the physical distance between floor and ceiling – the height of the volume of Farnsworth. It is a sonification of the structure, which melds minimalist percussion with the otherworldly tones of a vibraphone to encourage a reverie of Farnsworth where past and present and future meet in a kaleidoscope of light and sound and remembrance and imagination.

What do you do with a revered 20th century masterpiece? You learn it. You map it. You illuminate it. You reflect it. You project onto it and into it. You play it. That’s INsite.

Steve Dietz, President and Artistic Director, Northern Lights.mn