In Conversation With Litewerkz, the creators of Tessellations Of Time

Living & Lifestyle

Published on: January 11th, 2021
5 minutes read

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In Conversation With Litewerkz, the creators of the hit Night Festival piece Tessellations Of Time

The latter half of August 2017 saw the Bras Basah. Bugis precinct come alive in a flurry of dazzling floodlights, effervescent crowds and scintillating soundscapes as the Singapore Night Festival bedazzled one and all with their numerous interactive installations. Tessellations of Time, an attraction designed by Litewerkz and 3M Singapore, was easily one of the most colourful installations at the festival. An independent group of 10 student designers from SUTD, Litewerks’ other works include the immensely popular #showerthoughts, which saw crowds queuing for hours to get a glimpse of the installation. This year, they made a strong return with Tessellations of Time, an interactive installation comprising 10 prismatic pods of varying sizes. The uniqueness of this work lies in its interactive nature: the pods are programmed to display a magical kaleidoscope of colours whenever they are in contact with people. RenoTalk caught up with student group Litewerkz, where they elaborated on their collaboration with 3M, the inspiration behind the piece, and more.

RenoTalk: What is the inspiration for the Tessellations of Time piece? How was it conceptualized?

Litewerkz: Following the theme for this year’s open call, 10 Magical Years, we sought to visualise the nature of memories and how the illustrious decade of the Singapore Night Festival (SNF) could be celebrated.

Memories are unique to everyone, as each person takes away different fragments of the same event. The 3M films we used in this installation offers a duality of reflectivity and transparency that mimics the potential of one’s memories – it possesses introspective qualities from self-reflection, experiences, and lessons remembered while concurrently prompting one to be forward looking.

To that end, Tessellations of Time seeks to give shape to the memories of not only the individual patron but also of the collective Singapore Night Festival crowd, stitched together through an interactive light sequence.

RenoTalk: For those who missed out on the Night Festival this year, what were the mechanisms involved in the installation? What was unique about it?

Litewerkz: Our installation this year is unique because it is arguably one of the most colourful pieces of the entire festival. Special 3M films utilised in the construction of the pods enabled it to have varying effects during the night and day, especially when viewed from different angles.

Additionally, each of the 10 pods were all uniquely designed and coded to give different experiences to the audience. Each pod is digitally coded to trigger a unique light sequence as people approached or stepped into a pod, and no two pods had the same code. We also crafted varying modes of interaction – some required crawling, some just required walking into it.

The way the 3M films were used to create the installation were also varied in their visual application. Together, the combined uniqueness of these design goals allowed people to walk away from the installation with a myriad of experiences.

RenoTalk: How did the collaboration between LiteWerkz and 3M come about?

Litewerkz: The collaboration between LiteWerkz and 3M started quite early on, around January 2017.

Before we met with 3M, the foundation for the partnership was already being laid a month before in December 2017 when the company approached National Heritage Board (NHB) to work with budding local artists for the iconic festival.

They were particularly interested in collaborating with us as our #showerthoughts infinity room installation from the 2016 edition of SNF caught their attention. The installation, which was also made with 3M films, enjoyed queues of up to two hours, and they wanted to help us expand the scale of our participation for 2017. Thereafter, NHB linked us up with 3M.

After the first meeting where we proposed our concept, we felt that the company was a good fit as we were already familiar with their materials. We had used them for our #showerthoughts installation last year. More importantly, the access to their films would give us a lot of new and interesting materials to play with, which was something we looked forward to doing.

RenoTalk: What's unique about the materials used in the installations?

Litewerkz: The 3M™ Radiant Light Film and 3M™ Fasara™ Glass Finishes that we used in our installation had some very interesting properties. They enabled light to reflect and pass through at the same time. This was especially interesting to us as it supported our concept very well. We wanted to visualise the effect of looking to the future as well as reflecting on memories, and the films allowed us to do that. Both these materials have been used for both residential and commercial projects

The iridescent 3M™ Radiant Light Film also had a stunning effect. The material of the film affected select portions of the white light bandwidth by changing the direction and speed of the light rays. This produces various colour change effects when viewed at different angles and with different kinds of lighting. This helped us to create an aesthetically pleasing exterior for our pods, which drew people in.

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