
A massive interactive artwork and a particle accelerator-inspired bedside lamp took home 2017 AZ Awards of Merit in the category of Lighting Installations.

Project: Swarm Study / IX
Location: Chemnitz, Germany
Studios: Lichtvision Design (Germany) and Random International (U.K.)
Designer: Raoul Hesse
In Chemnitz, Germany, commuters of different feathers flock together beneath the pixels of the giant LED facade that crowns two sides of the city’s recently renovated train station. The largest interactive artwork from Berlin’s Lichtvision to date, completed in collaboration with London’s Random International, Swarm Study / IX translates the movements of nearby pedestrians and vehicles into pixelated heat maps that mimic the ebb and flow of migrating birds. Each five centimetre-wide pixel has a luminous flux of 40 lumens; combined into a four-storey backlit display powered by specialized software that generates cues in real time, the pixels create ethereal, ever-shifting masses of light and dark.

Project: Particle Accelerator
Studio: Castor Design, Canada
Designers: Kei Ng and Brian Richer with Nathan Watson
Particle Accelerator is not your average bedside lamp. It sits atop a 2.5-metre table, powered by two industrial black powder-coated boxes; the shorter one contains the electrical transformer, and the taller one encloses a vacuum system. A black marble base supports the final component: a hand-blown glass vacuum tube under a curving metal shade. At one end of the airtight tube, electrodes transmit a current through the vessel. In a demonstration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a column of luminous plasma ripples along the length of the glass tube, dramatically changing from pinkish-purple to white before dying out.