A luminous ring that relates space, light, time and sound

One of the most striking elements of this year's Amsterdam Dance Event was Nick Verstand's audiovisual project The Orbital, brought to the audience during the Awakenings Festival event at Gashouder Westergasfabriek, an old industrial complex redeveloped with the aim of host this kind of events. Over the years Verstand has managed to stand out for having to relate elements such as space, light, time and sound in his works, winning the attention of museums, galleries and festivals around the world together with artists such as Iris van Herpen, Bjork and Suzanne Ciani.

The Orbital project, designed in the beginning for the Royal Theater Carré, it appears as a luminous ring that correlates mainly with the surrounding architectural space. Consisting of about 8,000 super-fast LED pixels, set on a circular aluminum skeleton, the installation is maneuvered thanks to a special controller created for managing the light at 1000Hz, also making use of an IP protocol and software specifically created to make the movements of light and skeleton as fluid and natural as possible. The creative process of this kind of projects is mainly based on the possibilities offered by technology that are contextualized in a physical space, but which still rely on intuitive capacity and human sensitivity to exist, says Nick Verstand

The Dutch artist also argues that thanks to the rapidity of technological evolution, in the next few years it will be possible to integrate space, the elements of light and sound within an environment; therefore projects have the possibility of expanding their installations even outside a stage. Although the scenario imagined by the artist foresees a further technological expansion, according to him this will be used as a useful project for the creation of his own artistic language.