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1024 Architecture's New Light Sculpture is Truly Illuminating

Using high-tech and low-tech materials, 1024 Architecture's 'VORTEX' uses light and generative sculpture to compose a stunning Q-hour meter in the Darwin Ecosystem Project's green building in Bordeaux, France.
Images courtesy of the artists

What would it look like if you could visualize energy consumption?

Paris-based creative studio 1024 Architecture, who've previously created astro-physics dome projections, digital zen gardens, and even a giant light-up hypercube, recently unveiled VORTEX, a new generative light sculpture built into the unique architecture of the Darwin Ecosystem Project's green building in Bordeaux, France. Merging organic materials with new technologies, this hybrid architectural artwork wraps around and embraces the bridge between the complex's two buildings, revealing and enhancing the venue's dynamic energy while working as a live visualizer of energy consumption.

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VORTEX, constructed with wooden beams and a neon-and-LED-powered light system, progressively evolves like a living organism; it breathes, trembles and emits pulses of light created using 1024's MadMapper software. Manually controlled via a Playstation joystick, the structure can be synchronized to music and also displays its location's energy consumption through a series of illuminated tubes. It ultimately answers to the ambient environment around it, capturing the Darwin Ecosystem Project's unique energy consumption footprint, and converting it into data that is processed to spawn realtime visuals.

By turning energy-conscious data into light art, VORTEX is a magical installation that merges functional green thinking with beauty and spectacle. Below, check out some pictures from VORTEX's first lighting:

To learn more about VORTEX, visit 1024 architecture.

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