FILE SAO PAULO 2017
THE BREATHING CLOUD
“The Breathing Cloud” is a monumental floating organism. The work transforms a space by its motion, light, and rhythmic breathing. With this light art the phrase “let a room come to life” gets a new meaning. The clouds skin looks fragile and soft, and the movements are rhythmic, yet random, so the whole room feels like a living being. The technology is designed so that the strong LED modules and the mechanism support the pervasive breathing. It gets physically bigger and smaller and embraces with its bright light space.

frequencies (light quanta)

The project is part of an ongoing process entitled «frequencies», exploring basic sound and light dichotomic systems. Here, frequencies (light quanta) stems from a fascination towards science, light, and granular synthesis allowing to create clouds/grains of sounds. The conceptual focus lies in the quantum — the smallest measurable value of energy —, on the smallness of matter. The whole project is based on the possible conceptual relationships between basic quantum physics principles applied to the audio-visual creative process: particles, probabilities, wave/particle duality and discontinuity. Metaphorically structured around these notions, the audio-visual composition stems from 100 sound and light micro-sequences that develop themselves, generating an ever expending but yet disruptive form in time and space. With the use of randomness, the vectorial graphics are always creating new ways to look at the visual, physically superimposing pattern images.

Internal view of the O’Neill cylinder
“One of my earliest Space Colony paintings was based on the giant ‘Model 3’ cylindrical habitats envisioned by Gerard O’Neill. I imagined the clouds forming at an ‘altitude‘ around the rotation axis. At this time the scene is bathed in the ruddy light of all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth at that moment as the colony briefly enters the Earths shadow, out at the L5 Lagrangian point where stable locations are easily maintained. Oil on canvas panel disposition unknown. “

States of Mind
Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ practice is concerned primarily with light, colour, and perception. Janssens makes very few art objects. Instead, her work attempts to escape the ‘tyranny of objects’ and what she describes as their ‘overbearing materiality’. Since the late 1990s, Janssens has filled spaces with washes of coloured light or ‘haze sculptures’: dense, illuminated clouds of vapour that render surroundings unfamiliar and sensory perception altered.

كوهي ناوا
名和晃平
КОХЕЙ НАВА
foam
Japanese artist Kohei Nawa has immersed visitors at the aichi triennale in undulating sea of bubbling matter, surrounding the walls and floor in porous, cloud-like material. ‘Foam’ inhabits an almost pitch-black room, creating an ethereal quality that seems aesthetically otherworldly walking through the space, the topography of the puffs creates a massive terrain of floating material, stiff enough to stand in place, yet copious in its fragility and delicacy.

Green Cloud (Nuage Vert)
The third edition of Nuage Vert (Green cloud) highlighted the cloud of vapour emitted by the largest waste incinerator in France, on the edge of Paris at Ivry-sur-Seine, using a green laser beam which draws the clouds outline in real-time. Beyond the spectacle of the projection onto a power plant emission, Nuage Vert is also an open space, a canvas onto which each individual can project their questions concerning our consumer-waste culture, adding a second level reading to a site which is both highly visible and ignored.
The work acts like a semantic parasite, an organism that takes cover and feeds itself by establishing a sustainable interaction with another organism, in a relationship that is not necessarily damaging for the host, but necessary since the emission cloud provides Nuage vert with its visibility. During two years the project generated a social-cultural process which attracted support from citizens and the power plant owner, but however led to political obstruction from the local authorities. Escaping from a political stalemate, the work was realised without institutional consent, from a secret location on a private rooftop with the cooperation of local residents.
The project was previously realised in Helsinki, Finland and in Saint-Ouen, France.