Speed of Light

Over the weekend I was down on the South Bank enjoying the sunshine and to look at an exhibition that my mate from United Visual Artists had helped to create. Called ' The Speed of Light' it was commissioned by Virgin Media (our client) to commemorate a decade of broadband in the UK. (Virgin claims to have been the first company to install a fibre optic broadband connection in the UK when it connected Mark Bush in Gillingham, Kent)

Housed in the Bargehouse behind the OXO Tower 'The Speed of Light' exhibition was spread across four floors and five rooms with 149 lasers whizzing around. According to Virgin Media, "It reflects the speed of date and the way light is used to channel information. Stripped back to its essentials, optical fibre is a thin strand of glass, with nothing more than a flickering beam of light travelling along it. United Visual Artists have used this beam as the startin point for the work. The installations dramatise the experience of using fibre-optic communication, re-imagining it as an immersive environment."

The journey begins by descending into a glomy sunken double height room with a white wall flickering to red-lasered set of changing questions. Each question is designed to prompt the audience for a response into a microphone directly opposite the wall. Then as you climb up through the building and the subsequent rooms playback of your answer amongst everyone else's can be heard but always reinterpreted and mixed. This was used to great effect in the third room where the laser beam of light appears to represent sound waves warping to the sound of the audience's earlier inputs and churned through an industrial beat.

Before this a disco-smoke filed room has all the architecture picked out in flickering laser beams and then out of the smokey mist a sofa and TV appears round the corner, again formed out of reflected red lasers - it's a nice touch and a nod to Virgins Quad play offer (Broadband, TV, mobile & landline phones).

Onto the fourth room, a massive smiley emoticon face that I can only presume references their involvement in mobile technology. It felt at odds with the rest of the exhibition and left me wanting to know more as there were little and no explanations of what I was being presented with. In essence the exhibition was celebrating broadband and the possibilities that it has opened up as a method of communication.

The final room was the most overwhelming of the lot; At times looking like a scene from a movie with an invisible priceless diamond in the centre, then all of a sudden beams of light would fan out and begin to pick out spoken voices on the floor like echos on a ghostly map. Slowly they would creep across the floor toward you getting progressively quicker and greater in number. I'm pretty sure I could make out a few famous voices and quotes but perhaps it was the semi-derilect space contributing to the effect and playing tricks on my mind.

For the most part (emoticons excluding) it was an incredibly effective way of communicating the speed and possibilities of broadband and its spread into our day-to-day lives. As I sat on the South Bank tucking into an ice-cream shortly after I wondered what Mark Bush would have thought about it and whether or not the excitement of being inside this event had adequately captured the feeling of being the first person to switch off the dial up-modem for good.

Unfortunately 'The Speed of LIght' was only on for 10 days so you'll have to rely on some of the excellent 'developer diary' videos and walkthroughs at the links below to find out more and see what it was all about.

http://www.uva.co.uk

 http://vminstore.com/speedoflight/