Hasta La Ideas

Troika founding partner Eva Rucki explains the studio’s large-scale immersive light installations in this movie filmed by Dezeen at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Above: one of Troika’s Trixotrope pieces when spinning and illuminated

Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel founded Troika in 2003 after graduating from the Royal College of Art and have set up a flexible workshop space under a large railway arch in Hackney, east London.

Above: Trixotrope frame when still

The first of the studio’s installations she describes is Thixotropes, a series of rotating frames covered in LED strips. The light pieces hung in the atrium of London department store Selfridges for three months last year. “One of the most magic points for me in this installation is when the structure starts spinning and hits a point where it spins so fast that it becomes a solid volume,” says Rucki.

Above: detail of the LED strips used on the Trixotrope pieces

Four different designs were suspended in two columns and alternated on and off so shoppers on all five floors of the store could experience the way the pieces looked at different speeds from various vantage points.

Above: Trixotrope piece when spinning and illuminated

Rucki then describes Troika’s Light Rain project, first created for Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo then refined for crystal company Swarovski and displayed at the V&A museum as part of an exhibition of British design. “The way this device works is that you have a lens, a light and when the light comes closer to the lens and further apart and it has an animation written into the mechanism, which is a raindrop,” she says.

Above: Trixotrope pieces spinning and illuminated while hung in the atrium of Selfridges

“It contrasts technology, which is perceived as something often artificial and man made, with something like an innate memory of nature you has as a kid watching raindrops on the ground,” she says.

Above: The Weather Yesterday installation in Hoxton Square

Troika’s commission for Hoxton Square in east London was a light installation linked to yesterday’s weather forecast. “The slightly retro look wasn’t really a stylistic choice, but it’s based on the components the sign is built with: LED strips in modules of five,” Rucki says.

Above: LED strips used for The Weather Yesterday installation

“Quite a lot of our work uses software programming controls as well as typical physical design,” she summarises at the end of the talk.

Above: The Weather Yesterday assembled in Troika’s studio

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Above: the back of The Weather Yesterday showing the wires and circuitry

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney. See all our stories about design by Troika »

The post “We use software programming controls
as well as physical design” – Troika appeared first on Dezeen.

In the first of three posts about the Digital Crystal exhibition at London’s Design Museum, we look at a mechanical projector built by London design studio Troika which uses Swarovski crystal lenses and LEDs to create portraits on the gallery wall (+ slideshow).

The projector uses 858 custom-cut crystal optical lenses, each positioned in front of an LED.

Rotating cams move each LED towards or away from its lens, diffracting the white light into variously sized spots.

The spots of light then combine to produce three blurry, low-resolution portraits on the gallery wall.

“The recent past has seen a complete shift in the reproduction and selection process of visual information, and today we no longer need to restrict which and how many images we take,” Troika’s Conny Freyer told Dezeen.

“We are on the brink of a new age, still informed by the analogue world yet provided with new digital tools,” she added. “Hardcoded Memory is a reflection on that change and on the digital world by approaching it from an analogue point of view.”

The three portraits were selected according to their postures, in a reference to the traditional posed portraiture that was prevalent throughout the last century but is seen less often today.

Digital Crystal: Memory in the Digital Age continues at the Design Museum in London until 13 January 2013.

Other projects we’ve featured by Troika include an outdoor LED installation that displays yesterday’s weather and chandeliers that project overlapping circles of light.

See all our stories about Troika »
See all our stories about the Design Museum »
See all our stories about Swarovski »

Here’s more information from Troika:

Troika (Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, Eva Rucki)

Hardcoded Memory (2012)

2.60 m (H) x 2.0 m (W) x 0.4 m (D)
858 custom cut Swarovski crystal optical lenses, custom software, 858 LEDs, brass, anodized aluminium, dyed fibreboard.

Memory is closely linked to forgetting. Before the digital era, forgetting was easy, for better or worse. Not only is it biologically in-built to forget, the analogue world around us cannot guarantee that recorded memories will last forever.

Photographs fade, film footage can be lost and media out-dated. In the past, remembering was the exception, forgetting the default. Only a few decades ago, analogue photography was a limited edition of images taken of precious moments or the everyday: our grandparents, parents, children or ourselves. By selection, these images became meaningful, carrying the story for, and of, an extended period of time, a life, a person.

Now in the age of endless digital image reproduction there is no longer a function for a selection process, and so we do not need to forget. We externalise our memories by handing them over to the digital realm enabled through digitisation, inexpensive storage, ease of retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software, blurring lines of ownership and making virtual forgetting close to impossible.

Hardcoded Memory is a reflection on the moment and on time itself, standing as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and continuity, while celebrating forgetting in the digital age.

Low-resolution portraits are projected onto the gallery wall, generated by a hardcoded mechanical structure which in the nature of its construction limits the selection of available images. Custom-cut Swarovski crystal optical lenses project light from LEDs, which, motored by rotating cams, move away from, and toward to each crystal lens, transforming, through diffraction, the white light into a constellation of circular projections, creating a rhythmical fading in, and fading out of low resolution imagery on the gallery wall.

All pictorial information is hardcoded into the rotating cams of the mechanism giving a pre-determined selection of what can be displayed by the projector. And while the low resolution image is lending the portraits a universal appeal, the body posture of the portrayed informs a definite era or decade.

Experiencing the dream-like imagery on the gallery wall, the visitor is immersed in a digital memory embedded into an analog physical object, reinforcing Troika’s agenda of exploring rational thought, observation and the changing nature of reality and human experience.

The post Hardcoded Memory
by Troika appeared first on Dezeen.

London design studio Troika have been poking fun at the British obsession with the weather with their lighting installation in an east London park.

The LED lights on the five-metre-high installation change throughout the day to depict conditions from the same time the previous day, so passers-by can see whether the weather is better or worse.

Classic forecasting icons show whether it was sunny, rainy or cloudy, and a numerical display shows the temperature.

Custom-made software and a wireless connection enable weather data to be updated automatically.

The installation opened in east London’s Hoxton Square last weekend as part of the London Festival of Architecture, and it will remain there until 9th September 2012.

During the festival, the square was also home to a handful of cloud-like parasols designed by London-based architectural practice Harry Dobbs Design.

Photographs are by Troika.

See all our stories about weather »
See all our stories about Troika »

Here’s some more information from Troika and the London Festival of Architecture:

The Weather Yesterday takes our obsession with progress ad absurdum by sardonically changing our focus from ‘forecast’ to the ‘past’. The five metre-high sculpture celebrates the weather as a predominant topic of discussion in British culture while offering a spin on the urgency with which we are using our mobile devices, forecasting and interactive technology.

The London Festival of Architecture (23 June – 8 July 2012) with its theme of ‘The Playful City’ brings architects and communities together across the capital.

RIBA London is partnering with the London Borough of Hackney and consulting engineers Ramboll to transform Hoxton Square with the ‘Weather – It’s Raining or Not’ installation by architect Harry Dobbs, including ‘The Weather Yesterday’ by creative practice Troika.

An interactive light installation, ‘The Weather Yesterday’ will playfully highlight Britain’s obsession with the weather, with the square set to feature a collection of parasol-shaped structures around a central five-metre-tall visual creation displaying the previous day’s weather conditions using classic forecasting iconography.

Parasol-shaped structures from architects Harry Dobbs, playfully dotted around the square, offer social meeting places for rest, play and discovery under their cloudy canopies. Chameleon-like, they will respond to the visitor, at one moment creating a cosy space protected from the elements, or next opening up to support the wider shared experience of the square.

Exhibition on display 7 July – 9 Sept 2012
Hoxton Square
London

The Weather Yesterday
LEDs, aluminium, custom electronics
2,20 m (H) x 2,20 m (W) x 10 cm (D)

The post The Weather Yesterday
by Troika appeared first on Dezeen.

Hanging in the entrance of Heathrow’s new British Airways luxury lounges (opened in 08), Troika’s ‘Cloud’ and it’s 4638 flip-dots is hard to ignore. Check out the video to get the full effect.