Paris | Spectrum – Art talks about climate change

Spectrum | An installation by ARCHIEE for the “Nuit Blanche” in Paris

“Spectrum” is the installation conceived for the Nuit Blanche, which took place in Paris in October 2015. The project, based on the collaboration between the Paris-based creative studio ARCHIEE and the Japanese one sinato, was inspired by the theme of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) running in Paris from November 20 through December 11, 2015.
The artwork, which transformed for one night the installation site – a pedestrian tunnel near the Rosa Parks railway station in the 19th arrondissement – was conceived to evoke all the uncertainty and the magic of atmospheric phenomena. Therefore, it was not a fixed and tangible object but an ephemeral, transient, and evolving landscape, made by combining light, colors, and sounds together.

The intangibility and constantly changing shape typical of climatic phenomena were expressed by using two main elements: light and haze. To reproduce the latter, visually and conceptually important because intrinsically unstable, Archiee + sinato created a thin inclined plane made by overlaying different types of fabric, so to control, retain, and diffuse, the haze while still preserving a certain degree of uncertainty.

Light was used to achieve an effect similar to that of the Northern Lights, carefully combining red, green, and blue colors. The soundtrack was constituted by atonal music, intentionally divergent from classical harmony, conceived to express the absence of a fixed rule typical of natural sounds.

Architects: sinato + ARCHIEE
Artists: Chikara Ohno (sinato), Yusuke Kinoshita (ARCHIEE)
Lighting Design: ARCHIEE and Izumi Okayasu
Technical Program Design: Daisuke Sekine(ARCHIEE)
Music: Yusuke Kinoshita(ARCHIEE)
Photo: Maris Mezulis