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Ethereal Science: Troika's New Kinetic Light Sculptures Invade A London Department Store

Don’t worry, those otherworldly electric beings aren’t here to feed on your brains.

Art and design collective Troika’s latest kinetic installation, Thixotropes, will be lighting up the central atrium of Selfridges department store starting today until January 2, 2012. Known for their celestial light installations and mechanical sculptures that beautifully and subtly merge sublime design with bespoke technology, their latest piece continues their theme of creating ethereal, natural-looking works using scientific principles—while also extending the possibilities of light painting.

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The work is composed of eight mechanized structures, each a series of intersecting angular and geometric forms made of thin tensed steel lined with rows of LEDs, 6,400 in total. With heights of either 1.75m or 2.2m they’ll be a striking presence and look not unlike stripped back mechanized conifers with light-emitting branches. Once these LED arms start spinning around a central axis—at a speed of 360 rpm—they create the illusion of a solid, but otherworldly, glowing form, what Troika have called “compositions of aerial cones, spheres and ribbons of warm and cold light… giving life and shape to an immaterial construct.”

One of the completed structures

The name Thixotropes is an interesting choice, as the term thixotropy refers to the property of certain viscous fluids that flow when agitated, like some gels and clays. When asked what it was about thixotropic fluids that appealed to their artistic sensibilities, they said that it wasn’t an observational starting point but was instead used as a reference to changing states. They continued, “It is also looking at how the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us independently from the question of what properties a thing might have. At the same time, Thixotropes hints at the idea of opposites comprised in one—the static and the fluid, the visible and the invisible, the rational and the irrational, the material and immaterial, the artificial and the natural. Our interest lies in these contradictions and oppositions and how they can be or are ultimately integrated without reducing either one or the other.”

Video below shows a prototype in action

It took Troika—Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel—and their team of assistants about five months to design and build these lightning-fast electric forms. Eight of them hanging from the ceiling of a department store, perched high above the shopping crowds like guardians from another realm, will definitely cause people to stop and stare in awe. And if department stores aren’t your scene then they’re hoping to take them on tour after the residency.

Photos © Troika 2011