Boston Blog

Orbs, floating films and a string tunnel: MITs FAST Light weekend

Here are a few images from this weekend’s FAST Light weekend. The event is part of bothg the MIT150 celebration and the Cambridge Science Festival. Below find MIT’s descriptions of these installations, as well as short talks by the artist/ creators.

The event continues through this evening, Sunday May 8.

From MIT:

LIGHT DRIFT is an interactive lighting installation that will appear along the Memorial Drive side of the Charles River and draw viewers into a playful engagement with the artwork, the river’s edge, and each other. Ninety brightly glowing orbs in the river will change color as they react to the presence of people along the shore.

The lighting elements are shaped like orbs or buoys and are equipped with electronics that allow them to respond to a viewer and to communicate with each other. The orbs on land use sensors to detect the presence of a person and relay a radio signal to the corresponding orbs in the water, allowing visitors to transform the array of orbs in the river. As viewers engage the orbs, the grid of lights in the water becomes an index of the activities on land. Multiple viewers can create intersections of linear patterns, encouraging viewers to “play” with each other. These orbs bring the community together by providing gathering spaces for watching the river turned into a flickering constellation of a field of lights and creating new connections on the river’s edge.

MIT Tech TV

String Tunnel, Yuna Kim, Kelly Shaw, and Travis Williams, graduate students in Architecture

Although the path from Kendall Square to the main campus is familiar to students, faculty and staff, visitors to MIT often get lost trying to find the main campus buildings. String Tunnel is a pathfinder to the Infinite Corridor that The installation serve not only to creates a sense of entry to and from the Infinite Corridor, but it also frames the views around them.

MIT Tech TV

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