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Giant Laser Sphere Floods Your Retinas with Dancing Light

Design studio COCOLAB teamed up with the ARCA creative lab to create 'Cycles,' a massive light installation illuminated by 17 powerful lasers.
Images courtesy of the artist. GIF by Beckett Mufson

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COCOLAB, the Mexican design studio responsible for beautifully illuminated cathedrals and the projection mapped equivalent of a giant beehive, experiments with the chaotic mathematics of the sphere in new audiovisual installation, Cycles. The room-sized light sculpture earns its place among the repertoire they've been developing over the past four years with its hefty suite of 17 lasers, which cast geometrically programmed rays throughout the entire space that houses it.

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"The concept of the installation relies on the idea that our lives are ruled and defined by cycles," Josué Ibáñez, COCOLAB's art director, explains. "Cycles which at their core appear to be chaos, however at a distance they reveal to us the harmony and beauty of each repetition and their infinite possibilities."

Commissioned by creative laboratory, ARCA, the 21' diameter sphere was designed and simulated using TouchDesigner, then constructed inside the ARCA Mashup 2014 exhibition space. Ibáñez says that none of their plans were "making sense until the whole setup was up an running and we were able to see for the first time a self standing structure." Once it was set up, the real experiment began: the laser control tests they had been running had to convey their ideas in real life.

"There were a lot of discoveries in this project," says Ibáñez. To him, Cycles represents the circular nature of the universe, as well as "the possibilities of expression in a new dimension and the creation of crossed patterns that the structure was able to perform out of the combination of several beams of light."

See Cycles in action in the video and stills below:

Visit COCOLAB's website for more inspired light installations.

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