* The design story below detailed a winter light installation piece on display in downtown Montreal until about March 2011. The best part of doing this piece was how utterly enthusiastic designer, Bernard Duguay, was about doing the project, called Spheres Polaires. (I-heart-enthusiasm, btw. It’s a sentiment oftentimes lost in ultra-cool Montreal!). Duguay wanted to create a winterland of snowglobes, an abstract bubble-icious microcosm of the city, and totally succeeded.
This beautiful shot of the installation was taken by Dario Ayala, one of the my favorite Montreal Gazette photographers.
*The article below appeared in the Montreal Gazette and the National Post.
Electro-Snowglobes
An outdoor light installation featuring 25 giant glowing bubbles is set up in Montreal’s Place des Spectacles and the adjoining Place des Arts area, inspiring hordes of photo-happy tourists and passersby to interact with the urban landscape this season.
“It’s land art for winter, plus it makes you feel like you’re in the future,” explains Bernard Duguay, the art director of the project, Spheres Polaires. Duguay conceived of the electrofabulous snowglobe scene in response to a contest, open to the public, organized by the Quartier des spectacles Partnership.
“They wanted to populate the outdoor space with something dream-like and interactive,” he says. Duguay is founder of multimedia installation company Lucion Media, which has put on shows during Canada Day festivities and produced interactive displays at the Science Centre in Old Montreal. After hearing about the contest, Duguay quickly envisioned the micro-city of spheres. But at first he was hoping to do something high-tech with the bubbles, such as having people electronically paint on them. “After a lot of [research and development], we decided to go more artistic, which meant we had to be crafty. We thought of shadow theatre,” he says. Duguay’s winning project, Spheres Polaires, executed in collaboration with his colleagues at Lucion Media and with musical director Pierre Gagnon, is among three light installation works on display at three locations along St. Catherine Street in the Quartier des spectacles.
The visceral, magical-style bubbles of Spheres Polaires are made of white, reinforced vinyl hollow domes, which Duguay says appear ” E. T.-like” during the day (they’re meant to be viewed in the evening or night).
These inflated domes, or bubbles, range from three metres to 10 metres in circumference. Their interiors are lit and have one-metre-square speakers. Some contain a rotating mobile for producing special effects.
From the exterior, the bubbles boast three different themes — winter light, urban winter and winter games. These themes determine whether the bubbles are aglow with disco-like projections activated by sensors (winter lights), or covered in swirling shadow puppets featuring the Jacques Cartier Bridge or an airplane zooming by (urban winter). Expect to see abstract scenes of children playing hockey in the winter games theme.
Spectators can control the position of the lights in a few bubbles with the swish of a hand, thanks to a one-metre-tall puck-shaped sensor on the outside. The bubbles also emit sounds ranging from New Age whispers to exuberant roars. This unexpected audio helps shake you to the core.
“We made the bubbles close enough so they feel like the squeeze of the city. And like a dance with traffic lights, sound adds to the experience,” Duguay says.
– Spheres Polaires will be on display at Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles until Feb. 27.