Client: Quartier des Spectacles Partnership (Canada) and Light Night Leeds (UK)

Overview

Splinter is an installation comprising five monoliths arranged in a circle. They appear to emerge from the depths of the Earth, and conceal mysterious entities who are awakened by your movements. The entities respond to you and communicate with each other in a majestic dance of geometric shapes, set to melodious music. Activate multiple monoliths at once and they’ll reveal even more secrets!

Size of a monoliths: 11 pi (3.4 m) height / 5 pi (1.5 m) width
Artwork’s footprint: around 1,540 pi2 (143 m2)

Goals

Creative Intention: "The idea is for people to enjoy the experience on a physical level. This imposing work is inspired by nature and its shapes and interdependencies. The installation listens and entices people to interact with it. Each reaction is triggered by an action. Nothing happens magically – there is always a reason. We want the public to be the catalyst for a series of connected events." - Hugo Laliberté, Ottomata

Process

Most of the Luminothérapie projects produced for the Quartier des Spectacles are collaborative efforts, it was then natural for Ottomata and Jack World to join forces to create an interactive work of this scale. Ottomata is specialized in interactivity and immersion, and Jack World has a strong expertise in production and implementation.

This is a coproduction between Quartier des Spectacles Partnership, Light Night Leeds (UK), with UK funding support from Arts Council England and Leeds City Council (UK).

Additional Information

"The core inspiration is science fiction. We love Science-Fiction worlds, because to us they echo the mystery of monoliths made by people thousands of years ago, at a time when such technical precision seems unlikely to us. The entities are also representations of a world that doesn’t work according to the same rules as the human world, but by rules beyond our comprehension. Among other things, during the creative process we thought of the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the same film’s iconic AI character, HAL." - Hugo Laliberté, Ottomata