Magnetic Wall
Installation, 2014 — miSci: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science, Schenectady, NY
Installation, 2014 — miSci: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science, Schenectady, NY
Magnetic Wall is an interactive light installation in The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science. A beam of light is cast onto a large reflector sheet mounted to a wall. Visitors alter the surface by placing magnets, subtly reshaping the topography and casting dynamic patterns of light onto the ground below.
Designed by Yael Erel and developed in collaboration with Avner Ben-Natan, the installation explores how interactive slight shifts in surface geometry can generate mesmerizing visual effects. A smooth flexible reflective plane becomes, through real-time physical interaction, a canvas for evolving spatial drawings.
The piece was featured in the exhibition Revealing Lightscapes, assisted by RPI Architecture students Emily Broadbent, Elizabeth Lee, and Erin Butler.
Publications include CODAmagazine: Light as Art II (CODA WORX, 2015).
Dimensions: 72″ × 48″ × 4″
Photography and videography by Yael Erel and Avner BenNatan.
featured in
Revealing Lightscapes is an interactive light exhibition at The Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY. The installation, primarily targeted to young viewers, explores the principles of reflection through interaction and play.
The exhibition reveals different micro topographies of reflective surfaces as projected light drawings. The exhibition is an immersive laboratory composed of elements at various scales, each one using a light source, a reflective surface, and a screen to magnify minuscule atmospheric conditions that are normally overlooked.
The exhibition is grounded in direct physical phenomena that challenges the liminal nature of our senses - though we understand that a surface contains events at a micro-scale which we cannot easily detect with our eyes, when they are transcribed through a simple act of reflection, they become tactile and otherworldly.