The machine that paints with light
In 1930, after eight years of tinkering, the Bauhaus stage workshop's restless polymath finished a machine whose only job was to move light around a room. The Light-Space Modulator was never meant to be looked at — it was meant to be looked through: the sculpture is the shadows, reflections and sweeps it throws on the walls.
The Lichtspiel Pavilion scales that idea to a public square. Three perforated aluminium screens, each four metres tall, rotate at different speeds inside a scaffold cube. Four projectors cross-fire through them. The artwork is not the cube — it is the 240 square metres of moving light around it, and the fog of a Rodez December — the plateau earns it — turns the beams themselves into visible volumes.
Light is the material. The machine is only the brush.
— programme note, opening night
Choreography for three screens
The screens run a 22-minute cycle, composed rather than programmed:
- Overture — one screen turning, one projector, hard white light. The square learns the geometry.
- Interference — all three screens, speeds in a 3:4:5 ratio, so the pattern only repeats once per cycle. Colour arrives, primaries first.
- Fog solo — projectors dim to blue, and for four minutes the piece belongs to the weather.
- Coda — everything slows to a stop; the last minute is a single static shadow, held like a breath.
The full cycle, filmed on the second night:
What the fog changed
The piece was composed in a rendering engine with clean air. Rodez in December has other ideas, and they were better:
- beams read as solids, so the choreography plays in three dimensions
- attendance peaked on the foggiest night — 8,400 people by the city's count
- the blue "fog solo" section was written on site, two nights before opening
The pavilion ran for the four nights of the festival and is built to tour: screens, drives and projectors pack into two standard crates, and the scaffold cube is hired locally at each venue. Winter cities with a fog habit are top of the wish list.