Illumination Project - Afterlife - Frozen Time

Hi everyone!

Here comes another project for illumination class. The topic is "afterlife", my partner and I chose to make an installation which "freezes" time.

Basically, we got some strobe lights and a bunch of water bottles poked with holes and tied with strings. The idea is that when water drops out from the hole onto the string, it looks like its frozen in the air with strobe lights flashing at the same pace as the water drops.

We set up a long piece of wood drilled with holes which are for the water bottles and put it onto the beam of the ceiling with wires holding it.

After putting it up, we tried to put water bottles into the holes and see how fast the water drops. We found out that the water was dropping too slowly and it might have something to do with the air, so we decided to drilled a small hole on the back of each bottle which lets air in and pushes the water to drop faster.

We then adjusted the direction of the strobe lights, we can't make them shine in front of people and blind them. Therefore, we decided to hang the lights from above to midway and shine from both directions.

The final big piece:

We put a big black piece of paper under the smaller bottles because the color black shows the water drops more clearly and we put a piece of white paper under the bigger bottle because the drops from the bigger bottle form very beautiful patterns and they show clearly on white.






Final installation:

















Videos will be up soon! :)