The first thing I noticed about the Thin Air exhibit of light and sound installations at The Beams was that it had some very grumpy reviews. Time Out was definitely left unsatisfied: “It all looks incredible, but sadly it all means absolutely nothing… It’s just an empty nightclub and someone’s left the lightshow running and the smoke machine on.” London Unattached wasn’t too happy either: “Contemporary art fans like myself will certainly be disappointed by the calibre of the artworks on display.”
I wondered whether I should venture out. The Beams is located at Royal Docks. Five changes if I do it wrong (which I did). Four if I don’t. And four changes is at least three too many, as any seasoned Londoner knows. But I went. And… I thought it was great. Not all of it. But great enough in enough parts to make the trek worthwhile. It’s on ’til June 3 2023. So, if you’re reading this in time – my tl-dr; is go.
Space, feeling, and meaning
One thing the awkward location buys is interior space. 55,000 square feet of it. Space that surrounds you, space you can move in. Space at a scale where immersion isn’t an illusion but a physical fact.
Of the seven works on display, there were three that really engaged me:
- 3.24, by 404.zero, was impressive and theatrical – but I couldn’t bring myself to stay with it long
- Lines, by SETUP, was gentler, more varied, and intriguing, and I found myself engaged in the local moments – then wondering about modulation and larger scale patterns
- Banshee 2023, by Matthew Schreiber, was the most formal and austere, but, paradoxically, inspired the most playful behaviour from the audience
These installations were the ones that were given the largest footprints to occupy. No doubt, that contributes to their impact – but they also made good use of them. The works also demonstrate, at scale, issues and challenges about the aesthetics and experience of large scale immersive installations.
3.24, by 404.zero: hell, plus or minus other people
3.24, by 404.zero, is set in a truly massive space. The lighting mostly originates from lighting strips hung from the roof beams, via linear arrays, spot pooling and flooding. But there is also a softer more ambient mode that bounces from the walls. The sequences are pacy, and high contrast. They alternate between near total darkness to lightning flashes of extreme brilliant white. Longer sequences of light and dark extremes are sometimes punctuated with an ambient red.
The lighting changes put you into a theatrical space in which you, as audience, play various roles. The sound is important, too, and well integrated. You sense that things are happening – even if you’re not sure what they are.
AN example Lighting sequence from 3.24
To give you a flavour for the visuals, here is a set of frame grabs that walk you through one of the lighting sequence progressions.
In what I think of as the beginning of the cycle, most of the space is in darkness,there are few small distant pools of light. Silhouettes of other visitors are barely visible. The extent of the space you are in is unknown, but you sense it is vast.
Intense unnaturally bight white light in the distance reveals the extent of the space, and the presence of others.
There is a moving, focussed thin strip of white light that is bright like a nuclear bomb. As the blast of intense white approaches, the boundaries of the space blow out and become invisible again, this time in white rather than black, foregrounding the shapes and movements of other spectators.
From within the full intensity of the white light strobe, closer spectators become central to your experience, and you to theirs: everything and everyone else is obliterated.
The white sequences, which are driven from overhead, and flood or spot, are interspersed with ambient red settings, which diffuse from the side.
There is a strong theatricality to the experience, one in which you start out as as spectator and end up realising that you, like others, are part of the show. The space and the other spectators take on differing prominence and purpose as the sequences unfolds. In both extreme darkness and extreme light, the walls and all other physical surroundings disappear, and the focus concentrates on the current, fleeting moment, and the limited zone of visibility and possibility it provides.
Sound and fury
The sound that accompanies the light sequences is loud, just as the lighting is, in its own way, very loud. The soundscape, which works seamlessly with the lighting sequences, reminded me of artillery fire. This contributes strongly to the experience, and, for me contributed to its negative tone. Even if I was safe, in southeast London, in a former sugar factory, war is raging in so many places around our planet. It reminded me that’s what we are like, and it made me sad, and afraid.
If the sound had been different the experience would have been very different. What if it was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the theme from 2001?
experience and significance
3.24 is a dramatic immersive experience. You know something is happening. The problem, for me, is that that something isn’t a good thing.
Adding up the associations called up by the sound and the light, I felt as if I was trapped in an active war zone, and becoming a part of it. Or maybe I was trapped in a non representational and abstract post-industrial hell consisting of frightening sensations and other people (as Sartre said….). Either way, it’s a tough ride.
So although the work had an impact on me, my dwell time was brief. It’s not that I only want to feel good. (Although I do enjoy it.) Sometimes in life you do need to march straight through the muddy bits. The immersive WWI trench experience at the Imperial War Museum in London is a powerful example of showing, not telling, the experience of war, for those of us who have been fortunate enough not to experience it directly. But humankind can only bear so much reality, even in simulated form.
I have learned to be gentle with myself. I have limited tolerance for experiences – and people, for that matter – that only make me feel bad, no matter how impressive they are.
Lines, by SETUP:
Lines uses a similar mise en scène to 3.24 (reviewed above). It’s also set in a massive space, with lighting originating from lines of ceiling-beam-mounted lights, and a soundscape that is evocative rather than literal (or musical). But the experience has a very different flavour. There is a broader palette of sound, and a larger option set of lighting sequences. The moods, and mood changes, are harder to read. I stayed for many cycles to try to get the feel of the pattern, and puzzle out what I felt about it all. For me, it was both more likeable and less impactful than 3.24.
Sound palette
The sounds in Lines set the tone for the experience. They aren’t fully literal, but they are not abstract, either. Many of the elements I heard echo the venue’s history as a former factory and warehouse:
- rogue electrical transformers, sparking and about to blow
- a background hum, as if huge machines were operating at a distance
- reverberant metallic clangs, underpinned with atonal drone
- martial drumming, in a repeated rhythm
- various synthetic electronic whooshings
The sounds in Lines aren’t identifiable as being emitted from specific things, but whatever they are and wherever they come from, they all emanate from the “industrial zone” of the rainbow.
Some of the sound sequences in the piece would make excellent sound effects, supporting dramatic action and mood. In the installation, lacking the context of a human narrative, or other shards of meaning, the audio element comes to the fore, and defines the mood of the overall experience. The sound supports the experience by holding up cue cards about the emotional significance of the moments on display. Without the sound, the whole experience would be more neutral and abstract.
It works well on a local level, moments pass and their succession is smooth. It’s in the larger scale experience that I began to feel lost. There were moments of rhythm – most noticeably, of martial drumming, synched with the light effects. However, as far as I could figure out, there wasn’t any larger scale dramatic pattern playing out, in how and why moods succeeded each other. It’s as though there was an opera or a movie missing, that I couldn’t quite reconstruct based on the clues I was given. Initially I found this intriguing, but after watching and listening to several repeated cycles, I found it alienating. Maybe the underlying message is that there is only the moment.
Sound and light interplay
Sound and lighting expressions in Lines are strongly synchronised. When something happened in lighting, there is sound – and vice versa. This approach skips over expressive possibilities that flow from treating the relationship between modalities as a design element in its own right – but it’s fairly typical of how these elements are combined. To play with expectations and resonances in this relationship might requires a more developed vocabulary of multimodal form than we have yet developed, as creators, spectators, and participants.
Visual elements
The colours and forms in Lines lighting are more varied than in 3.24, as you can see below. When a monochrome set is used, as in the middle picture, it really stands out.
It’s all very active. Light patterns move and change continually, sometimes moving linearly along the ribbons they are hosted on, sometimes moving perpendicularly, across the supports, and also sometimes moving without a definite direction.
It’s also – mostly – all very abstract. There is only one sequence that caught my attention as being almost representational. In the sequence that looked like something, a shadow with a distinct shape seems to fly over the otherwise illuminated light field. Whether it was the shadow is of a giant sea turtle, a spacecraft, or a war plane wasn’t clear to me. But it is interesting how absence, more than presence, suggested the piece’s only concrete, physical interpretation.
Another characteristic of the style of the piece’s lighting is the transition speed of the lighting effects. The frame grab sequence below – showing only major changes – spanned less than 12 seconds. Significant changes sometimes repeatedly took place between frames (1/60th of a second), which is below our threshold of conscious awareness. So there’s a lot to look at – but typically no focal point.
The pace is relentless at times. The work seems to be desperately trying to maintain my attention through constant change. But although we are hard wired to attend to change, some effects only have maximum impact by virtue of contrast. A crescendo isn’t a crescendo if the volume is always dialed to 11. I wonder if more modulation of pace would be interesting to explore, as a creative element.
Banshee 2023, by Matthew Schreiber:
Banshee 2023, the other installation that really impressed me, is very different from the other two (3.24 and Lines). The work takes shape from a large number of tiny static red laser beams which are precisely mounted on a built custom framework, and on the floor. At first glance, on first entering the room, the work seems static, formal, and austere.
The lasers are arranged so that their intersections form a series of parabolic curves and grid spaces which hang in the air. They look like an instrument, or a graph of a planar surface, but there is no sound. The curved 3D surfaces formed by the lines’ intersections form empty grids that twist and lines that curve. It’s beautiful. However, on its own it doesn’t do anything. The lights don’t change colour, or turn on and off, or move. They don’t make noise.
The lines of light initially appear as if they might be solid, and when people first enter the space they are cautious about walking through them. But, as you watch, the experience changes. It’s very soon obvious the beams aren’t solid, and when you walk through them, what you see, and what other people see, changes.
The work becomes animated through the presence of spectators. The movement of the audience layers over and under and through the precision of the lines of light. As people move, their movement causes the work to change shape subltly as bodies interrupt the light beams by walking through them.
Many spectators were drawn into interacting with the work by walking through the lights, to explore the effects they could create. I saw one person pluck on lines of light as if they were the strings of a giant harp. Small children were the best at just heading headlong into exploring – running through the beams again and again (and back again).
It’s an unusual sort of interactivity. The exhibit doesn’t actually do anything, either on its own initiative or in response to the actions of spectators. But what we all see, as experiencers, changes dramatically and dynamically as a result of how we use the space, and how we explore the effects that blocking the light can create. Starting as spectators we become, once again, performers.
For Banshee 2024, if there is one, I’d love to see what spectators would do, if interrupting a beam created a sound, and the sound that was made could depend on where the beam was interrupted. There is a lot of fun that could be created based on that. What if the mapping changed as the experience unfolded….? (But I digress…)
Immersive aesthetics
In reflecting on the experience, I think enjoyed the installations as much for the questions they provoked for me, as for the immediate experience I had while I was there. A long aftertaste is a good quality.
The questions that the works posed for me were about:
- performance and participation
- representations for sound and light choreography
- abstraction and impact.
These are all design spaces where there isn’t an established way of doing, or thinking, or talking. Which makes exploration all the more fun.
Performance and participation
One consequence of the scale of these installations is that the audience becomes part of what is seen, as they wander around, or stand and spectate. Two pieces really take advantage of this, and make it part of the experience:
- In 3.24, other spectators’ presence becomes highlighted by changes in lighting – with figures appearing as high contrast silhouettes, as if part of a stage set, and become the only visible elements of the visual field
- In Banshee 2023, spectators bodies block the geometry of laser light beams and animate the geometry of the piece.
These two approaches have contrasting impact – the first deepened the flavour of alienation and doom I felt in the piece, the second, reminded me that it possible to be playful. There is no single way in which this works. While the first type of engagement was inadvertent participation, through being lit, and defining space, the second is based on spectating others’ agency and choice.
Participatory theatre in the modern sense is now part of our repertoire of form. And it is also part of the expressive vocabulary of installations. It adds a new dimension of possibility. However, despite the increasing accessiblity of maker technology to creators, it is still rare to routinely experience works that takes advantage of the options available. Work that seemed fresh at the Decode V&A exhibition 13 years ago is still niche. Display technology has scaled but the design logic behind it hasn’t caught up.
Sound and light choreography
The questions about sound and light choreography in AV installation work is a big one, and I am only going to wave at it briefly here, and promise myself to return to it later. Though if you read this blog regularly you might not want to hold your breath for that.
The coupling of sound and visual effects in the works in the installation always seemed straightforward: the sound and the light were in synch. A very “does what it says on the tin” approach. This could be a function of the tooling used, and the representations it supports. It could also be a function of the way we experience and integrate multimodal stimuli: we expect the world to function in a particular way, and that expectation acts as a force that bends what we experience consciously into a pattern and form that we expect. That’s the way perception works in so many domains. I wonder if there could be lots going on in the raw pattern of physical stimuli of sound and light, that simply doesn’t make its way to my awareness.
Again, I feel there is more to be explored here. Firstly, in understanding what filters through to awareness. But also in the expressive possibilities of using the coupling of sound and light as a design element in its own right.
Abstraction and impact
The abstraction of the sound and light also makes the works difficult to talk about – as we almost entirely lack an established vocabulary for it – but that’s a problem that stands behind an even bigger one. The abstraction of both the audio and visual elements of the installations is challenging makes it difficult to maintain attention and engagement over a really sustained period. At times, the experience seems like watching a VFX show reel, without the narrative that it’s meant to support. I feel something is missing, not necessarily in the moment, but in the progression and flow.
Do immersive light and sound installations need to have meaning?
Personally I like fireworks displays, as a genre, although they don’t typically say anything. But despite that, if they are any good, they have a dramatic structure, emotional impact, and – typically – beauty. I feel the same about abstract modern choreography, singing in other languages, and instrumental music. I like the genres, overall, although they aren’t strictly translatable into a meaning you can pin down and point at. And yet, although they aren’t strictly translatable, they are, in a way, interpretable.
Meaning isn’t the most important thing about these forms of art: experience is. Within an immersive AV experience, there can be emotion, suspense, puzzlement, curiousity, release, and a host of other experience ingredients. The works can be powerful, impactful, and dramatic, without being meaningful, in the sense of saying something specific in language.
However they are not meaningless, just because their meaning is difficult to pin down in words. Such meanings as they contain may be inchoate and inexplicit, resistant to articulation. And yet can still have an impact. So for me the answer to the question of whether immersive AV works need to have meaning depends on what you mean by meaning. They need to have impact, and that impact is partly determined by the fact they change and unfold in time.
I don’t think that art of any sort needs to be fully explained, or explainable. Immersive installation works included. But it should at least make you feel, if it doesn’t force you to think.
So… what?
So, as I said earlier: go.
Insight analysis 