Get involved

We’re told from a young age never to touch lights while they’re on, but a light installation in london this winter asks us to do the opposite. Sam Philips reports

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, in the basement of Soho art gallery Riflemaker, comprises a grid of 220 palm-sized, square LED tiles, lit in a variety of bright colours and mounted using magnets to a wall covered with steel plates. You can pick up and rearrange the tiles, change the colour of each by touching its glass and - in the installation’s major technical innovation - transfer the colour of one tile to another by touch: for example, if you hold a blue tile in your left hand, any tile you touch with your right will also turn to blue.

This playful installation is the first major lighting work by Massachusetts-based design studio Zigelbaum + Coelho, named after its two young founders Jamie and Marcelo. The pair met at MIT’s Media Lab, one of the leading new-tech research facilities in the US, and their projects attempt to integrate humans, computers and materials in ingenious ways, from the control of computers with hand signals to embedding them in everyday items such as sheets of paper.

“The better the relationships we can create with technology the more powerful a tool it can be, and the better we can communicate with each other and understand ourselves,” says Jamie Zigelbaum. However toy-like Six- Forty by Four-Eighty appears, its genesis was similarly conceptual. It was conceived as a metaphor for the pixels on a computer screen, its title inspired by a standard set of screen dimensions. By encouraging us to take the tiles, or pixels, in our hands, the designers re-imagine the computer as something at one with our natural, gestural instincts.

Let’s get physical

This promotion of the physical relationship between user and technology extends to the work’s details. “We wanted the light to react to touch in the same way that physical materials do,” says Zigelbaum. “The light dims just a little bit where you touch a pixel on its glass, as if it’s a physical object receding under pressure. When you release your finger, the LED fades into the next colour on the programmed palette.” The production process mirrored the tactile nature of the installation - the pair made all the pixels by hand.

Proto Labs first provided the polycarbonate white polymer for the exterior of each pixel. “They have a rapid injection moulding system that’s very fast and much cheaper than others,” says Zigelbaum. Inside each pixel there is a custom-made computer circuit board, mounted next to “a fantastic, very low-powered LED from Cree - it’s the most energy efficient LED of its kind available.” Efficiency was vital because each pixel’s power source is a lithium rechargeable battery; after a night’s charge on the rack the designers have created, the LED can glow for a week.

Phone technology

Standard capacitive touch-sensitivity technology, used in products like the iPhone, enables a pixel’s colour to change at the touch of a hand. But the transfer of colours from one tile to another by touch was a more complicated trick. “The first pixel sends out an electronic signal through the screen and, because you’re touching it, you become the signal’s conductor. The signal is then transmitted through your body into whatever other pixel you touch. The pattern of the signal describes digital information - the ones and zeros of code - and that information is understood by the second pixel.”

The hardest component to get hold of was glass that could enable this function. They settled on a composite of flashed opal diffusive glass and Pilkington TEC Glass 7, “which is impregnated with indium tin oxide that allows it to be conductive and transparent, but also very robust”. An infra-red remote control changes the colour scheme from a distance.

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty is sold as a limited-edition artwork - with a price tag to match - but the designers don’t intend it to be seen solely in gallery spaces. The installation was initiated by the art fair Design Miami/Basel in 2010 when the duo won the show’s annual Designers of the Future Award, and has since toured international hotels owned by the award’s sponsor, W Hotels.

The duo is planning to develop some consumer lighting products for domestic environments that will incorporate similar electronic systems, but will be available at a more accessible price. Wireless charging technology would keep the batteries full at all times. “Our idea is that if you wanted light in one area of your bedroom, you could just pick up some light and spread it out on the wall,” Zigelbaum enthuses, “and if you wanted to change the quality of that light, you would touch and interact with the light itself directly, as if it were a material like wood.”

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, Riflemaker, London (www.riflemaker.org, 020 7439 0000), until 31 March 2011

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment.