As the new semester is now underway, this will be our last regular installment of the Studio/Lab photo series. Keep checking back for other news on interesting projects at the intersection of art, science, and technology, and stay tuned for our fresh season of exciting residencies, courses, and programs.
Floor van de Velde, a master’s candidate in the MIT program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), is attracted to reflective surfaces. She works in her studio a lot at night, when her experimentations in light appear so intensely radiant as to be almost tangible. “They start to vibrate,” van de Velde told us, referring to the neon stripes of orange arranged in a woven pattern on her work table. Indeed, her forays into the perceptual phenomena of light, sound, and space reveal the slippage between the immaterial and the physical.
In her “computer-augmented sculpture,” Pattern is Movement, which was a winner of the Schnitzer prize, van de Velde combined the materiality of the sculptural form with digital layers of colorful projected light, through a process called projection mapping. Light and sound assume movement, volume, and three-dimensional shape as she explores the visceral power of abstraction.