MADE IN CYLAND
ELENA GUBANOVA & IVAN GOVORKOV
DANAE
Media Installation, 2014
max\MSP, Arduino, TouchOSC; golden plastic mirrors, steel, custom made circuit boards, 3D printing, milling, servomotors, microcontrollers, computer, contact microphones, surface transducers, DMX light
Circuit board design, 3D modeling, TouchOSC programming, engineer Alexey Grachev
max\MSP programming Sergey Komarov, Alexey Grachev
“Light exerts physical pressure on objects in its path, a phenomenon which can be deduced by Maxwell’s equations, but can be more easily explained by the particle nature of light.” (Wikipedia)
The artists approach the myth of the daughter of Acrisius and the god Zeus as a beautiful illustration of the life-giving force of the “immaterial” in art. Danae is a multimedia object-sculpture made of “live” round mirrors that quiver.
In the installation, the artists connect the algorithm of movement of light with the algorithm of movement of a viewer’s eye over Rembrandt’s painting. The mirror’s quivering and the trembling reflection of light from its surface create a sensual, erotic context of the object’s perception. In all ages, scientists and artists strived to represent the mundane as mysterious.The nature of light is one such mystery — photons strike and transfer their momentums. At large scales, light pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster, acting on their irregular shapes as on the vanes of a windmill.The sculpture’s general outline can be visibly correlated with the figure of Danae in Rembrandt’s painting in the Hermitage. It is no accident that one of the asteroids that rush about the Universe in search of living light was called Danae.
