From Twente With Love | Amsterdam Light Festival

Saturday 26 March 2016

During the Amsterdam Light Festival 2016, the DreamTeam of DesignLab produced an artwork to be integrated into a canal in the city. Inspired by biomimicry, the artwork embodied the intimacy of human touch in the form of blow kisses to boats passing by.

In September 2016, DesignLab was approached by Almelo-based artist Randy van Lingen and Director of the Twentse Ambassade Danny de Vries. Together, they asked if we wanted to create an art installation and exhibit it at that year’s Amsterdam Light Festival, an annual exhibition where artists showcase light works around the city, turning Amsterdam into an open exhibition. With great enthusiasm, we decided to join forces and create an artwork of our own!

We started off by brainstorming what to make, and landed on a concept for a giant wave which emerges from the canal. Inside this wave, we would display Voronoi diagrams, can actually be found in many biological structures. This is also connected to the festival’s theme of biomimicry. On the back of this wave, we were going to attach van Lingen’s faces which could give blow kisses via a water pump. Our wave would send light pulses to the faces which would emerge as blow kisses to people observing on a boat.

With the festival starting in December, we only had two months to design and develop the installation. We did it all in DesignLab, although we outsourced the production of a metal frame to Doeschot.

2 months, thousands of LED strips, and hundreds of glue sticks later, we realized that we were going to need all the help we could get. So we asked around in the DesignLab community if anyone was willing to jump in and help us prepare wiring and soldering. Fortunately, we had many students interested in joining, and DesignLab all of a sudden turned into a melting pot of students running around, soldering LEDs, and one of our team members even burned a hand on a glue gun which required immediate attention at the hospital. That didn’t stop us, however – we worked day and night until the week before the exhibition opening to finish work!

Because time was running out, we could not test everything at DesignLab. So we had to cross our fingers and hope that everything would work out after bringing the artwork to Amsterdam. Of course, Murphy’s law happened and many things went terribly wrong. First of all, working on electronics with our fingers, outside in the freezing cold during winter was both a mental and physical challenge. Being sleep deprived certainly did not help any matters, as the team usually closed up shop at 01:00 and returned to the site at 07:00. Did I mention that it was also raining? Luckily the electronics were intended to be water proof, but there were nights when the current would travel through the rain and shock our engineers, which was a clear signal to go home and wait until things dried out before continuing with some of the electronics.

Second of all, the artwork did not come together as we hoped and we had to adjust many components and re-solder LEDs, all while the artwork was connected to the canal. This meant that we had to perform some acrobatics above the freezing water, hanging off the scaffolding to reach certain parts.

It was a chaotic build-up, with many feeling they were going to fall into the canal while navigating the tilted terrain and dodging other people and objects in the process. It was truly a mental and physical challenge, but in the end we succeeded and our artwork lit up the canal from December through to January. To start from scratch and turn a concept into reality for thousands of visitors to experience was a tremendous feeling. And we couldn’t be more proud of the results!