Vitis Light
Inflatable lighting system.
-
Named for its similarity to a grapevine, the Vitis Light is an experiment in lighting solutions. The aim was to create a pneumatic light that capitalizes on the benefits of inflatables: lightweight, inexpensive, and deployale.
-
Beachballs, nylon webbing, LEDs.
-
6’ x 3’
Based mainly upon research with materials and light-weight structure; this project touched on the work of Frei Otto-- with his method of drawing geometry from existing natural phenomena ie. a soap bubble cluster. He would project light through the translucent film of the bubbles on to a wall and then translated the projection into plans for non-building structures. He called this type of form discovery, material computation.
With the idea of using LED beach balls as building material for a lighting fixture, I began by looking into sphere clusters and sphere packing methods for formal direction. I came upon research on spherical microbial particles suspended in a liquid, referred to as colloidal particles. The study focused on how these spherical particles (about a nanometer in size) would cluster together when held in a bead of water.
After finding form from these clusters, I began constructing a nylon webbing harness system that would act as the the bead of water holding the beach balls together like the colloids.
The result from this research based project became a human-scale interpretation of the colloidal cluster that provides an ambient light, somber in appearance and subtle enough to look at directly.