It's hard to imagine what the internet might look like as a physical object. This is the challenge light artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke undertake with the kinetic audiovisual light installation and performance, Deep Web. The two artists visualize the nodes and connections of digital networks on a 10-meter high structure equipped with 12 high-powered laser systems and 175 motorized spheres, each roughly the size of a light bulb.
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The installation comprises two even parallel rows of these suspended orb objects. Each sphere is lit up by a very specific spatial laser beam that is shot directly onto each bulb, allowing the artist to create animated endpoints for the normally infinite laser beams. This intricately meshed network of light represents an imaginative similitude of the computer networks and systems that make up the deep web. The 175 spheres hanging in the performance are choreographed to move up and down in tune with one of Henke’s original multi-channel musical score. The performance builds these connections of light into horizontal node patterns in midair, creating what the artists are calling, “three-dimensional vector drawings.”
The project was originally supposed to debut during the Festival of Light in Lyon last year, but the show was canceled after the terror attack in Paris. The video below is of a performance preview the duo gave in Berlin leading up to the project’s formal debut in December at the Festival of Light in Lyon.
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