Light Artist Presentation: Luftwerk

From their website:

“Luftwerk is the artistic duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Since founding in 2007, the practice has developed a significant body of work that explores the interplay of light, color and space through the exploration of data, nature, history, and architecture. Their work is multi-faceted, taking the form of installations, site-specific interventions, and artwork, engaging with landscapes, architecture along with galleries, museums, and art centers.”

Luftwerk combines the German words “luft”, meaning air, and “werk”, meaning work or artwork – meant to capture the ephemeral, immaterial properties of light and the framework in which it takes shape.

Tools & Techniques

Luftwerk creates art installations that transform experiences of space and sites through manipulation of light, seeing how it affects or reveals its surrounding environment’s characteristics. Luftwerk takes an interdisciplinary approach, using a variety of techniques and materials to create their installations. These techniques include video projections, light and sound, material and elemental surfaces, back-lit digital prints, and laser lights.

Concepts & Ideas

These two quotes summarize what their work is about quite well:

“The ephemeral, immaterial properties of light and the materials in which they are experienced”
Luftwerk.net

“Their work intends to shift viewers’ perception of space and site through light and color, inviting the public to experience the familiar transformed”
Creative Mornings Chicago

A Selection of Works

When Heaven Melts

Their first collaborative work, When Heaven Melts, was a suspended collage consisting of sixty blocks of clear ice hovering a crescent pool that collected the water as the ice melted, playing a melodic tune as the water dripped. Imagery of rolling clouds was projected onto the wall of ice because the work was inspired by higher elevation clouds, which consist of ice crystals that melt upon descent into lower elevations.

Projecting Modern

Luftwerk’s first collaboration with architecture in which they used video projections to highlight the ideals of modernism within the linear and spatial qualities of the first modern home, the Robie House by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Shortly following this collaboration, they collaborated with another one of Frank Lloyd’s famous works: Fallingwater.

Luminous Field

Luminous Field transformed the Millennium Park into a digital canvas of motion, light, and geometrical form, illuminating Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and the AT&T Plaza, with images and colors set to music composed by Owen Clayton Condon. The work consisted of projections that video-mapped the tiles of the plaza creating a digital mosaic.

More Light!

A collaboration with the Poetry Foundation and inspired by Aram Saroyan’s one word poem “lighght”, More Light! emerges the public into a lightbox, an ever-changing prism of colors.

The title of the installation comes from the deathbed words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of the scientific treatise The Theory of Colours which proposes that colors are different admixtures of “properties” we call “light” and “dark”.