Installation, 2014 — miSci: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science
Open Light Box is an interactive installation designed as a miniature laboratory for exploring the behavior of reflected light. Inside the open box, visitors are invited to place and rotate various metal reflectors, each positioned to catch and scatter light onto an adjacent screen. As the reflectors move, the surface textures shift and transform into projected light drawings—fleeting compositions that reveal the three-dimensionality of each reflective plane.
The installation gives viewers direct control over the mechanics of projection, allowing them to shape the movement, form, and intensity of light with their own hands. It’s a tactile meditation on how subtle changes in surface and orientation create new visual phenomena in real time.
Designed by Yael Erel in collaboration with Avner BenNatan, Open Light Box was exhibited in Projecting Topographies, Revealing Lightscapes, and Light Topographies. Research contributions came from RPI Architecture students Emily Broadbent, Elizabeth Lee, and Erin Butler.
Dimensions: 11″ × 17″ × 8″
Photography and videography by Yael Erel and Avner BenNatan.
featured in
Revealing Lightscapes - 2014
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.
Projecting Topographies - 2014
Projecting Topographies 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.
Light Topographies - 2017
Like entering a spatial microscope, micro topographies are revealed through a simple act of reflection.
This immersive exhibition is grounded in direct physical phenomena, challenging the limits of our perception. Although we understand that a surface contains micro-scale events we cannot easily detect with the naked eye, when they are transcribed through reflection they seem otherworldly and alive.
The exhibition uses light as a projectional drawing device at the scale of architecture. The light drawings are a system composed of a light source, reflector and the surface on which the drawings register, inextricably linking the drawing to its projection. Light and sound here interact similarly to how they would at the oceanside; their correlation too complex to follow but is readily perceived, addressing the multi-modal nature of human perception.
Light and sound are intertwined, drawing visitors into the wonder and complexity inherent in the seemingly simple patterns being transcribed.