Over the years, I have made it a personal mission to accumulate materials that can be used to shape, distort, contain, diffuse or otherwise transform light. Here is a material that I’d like to continue exploring.
I took this video on April 9, 2019 at 2:33 AM, a typical hour of my night when I am kept awake by the sheer spark of curiosity for a new material. I am demonstrating the effects of overlapping two lenticular lenses to manipulate three different Philips Hue colored light sources within my bedroom in their existing locations. The magenta bulb is located on the left side of my desk in an exposed clamp light; the spring green bulb is positioned on the right side of my desk on a lamp with no shade; the periwinkle light is actually located behind me in the video towards the left, also on a clamp light. I found the effects to be striking, very evocative of emboldened neon lighting as if these LED bulbs were instantly transformed into tubes infused with swirling inert gas. The properties of the lenticular lens are both reflective and magnifying, shaping the light that is not just directly behind it but also the ambient sources within the room. The lens is an array of a cylindrical ridges molded into the plastic - when the ridges are vertical, the light is stretched horizontally. However, when the ridges of the second layer are no longer aligned with the first, there is almost a wispy, aurora-like quality. I played around with the distance between the two layers, made them convex / concave, and observed how bendable the light became.
I purchased these lenticular lenses to create a series of shadowboxes, initially intended to create moving images with photographs of my friend Christina Lan that were taken by Anjelica Jardiel. The goal was to create this lenticular image or “analog gif,” which would be illuminated with addressable LEDs controlled by madMapper. Within the frame, the lenticular lens created this linear rhythm that caused the portrait to vibrate Other portraits in the series were installed with one-way mirror film, so that the image would be revealed when the LEDs would be activated.
Album Cover for Laenz’s EP litno. Graphic by Laenz. Photography by Anjelica Jardiel
For more images of this installation, please view them on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1G4rrSlnLr/