FLUOROZA
Light installation with 50 fluorescent spheres floating in the river Reuss in Lucerne.
Elaborated in the LABOR 5020 collective together with Andrés Villa Torres and Sandro Poli.
For LiLu Light festival Lucerne 2019
Fluorozoa is a net of floating fluorescent organisms, dispersed among the water,which are lighted from above and from bellow with UV Light. The organisms are synthetic and electronic artefacts handcrafted with different materials and technologies. They are translucent, fragile and flexible, containing a liquid sensitive and reactive to the light length waves emitted. The installation is a play between light patterns moving among the surface of the river and the depth of the water, trying to exacerbate the invisible forces interacting between the constant flow of the currents and the networked devices.
Background & Motivation
Life, although fragile and in constant change, can be found in every corner of the Earth. The human species in its short time span has over populated the Earth and through technology has affected the processes of evolution and transformed the environment impacting all kinds of life forms. It is yet unknown and hard to understand the complexity on how our species, technology and the environment will coexist in the coming decades. It is already visible that the borders between the natural and the artificial are becoming thinner and starting to disappear as the natural adapts or perishes and the artificial persists and permeates all the corners the human world. Fluorozoa is a mix of two words. The first part is extracted from the latin Fluorum, word describing the element Fluorine, being this the first element discovered in which the phenomena of Fluorescence was first observed. The phenomena is attributed to materials which have the capability to emit light or to reflect it in special ways such that certain wavelengths become more visible. The second part of the name comes from the word protozoa, extracting from it zoia, plural of zoion, which in Greek means animal. Protozoa stands literally for the first animal, and the light installation Fluorozoa is inspired in these life forms, which are thought to have been the first unicellular forms that populated the waters of the earth in the dawn of life.