Lightwave is a bright and shiney new festival ran by the Science Gallery to herald their launch this year. The Science Gallery is an initiative of Trinity College Dublin promoting the area where art meets science.

There is a great selection of exhibits on show including Beau Lotto’s ‘Bee Matrix’, Karl D. D. Willis’ ‘Light Tracer’, Benjamin Gaulon’s ‘De Pong Game’, Elke Harras’ ‘Light Drops’ and many more.

During the course of last week there was a number of talks and workshops at the gallery providing stimulating discussion and educational playtime. Here are my highlights…

On Monday I attended Beau Lotto’s talk ‘What We See, What We Do’ which was a very interesting presentation on the nature of light and colour. He talked about perception and illusions and about how our learned experiences affect what we see. He also showed some of his work where he experiments with the relationship between sound and light demonstrating the sound a painting would make as one example. Have a look at his site for more information about his work.

On Thursday evening I went along to G.R.L. (Graffiti Research Lab’s) LED Thowies workshop. This was a lot of fun indeed and very interesting to hear about the history of their project and how the mega corporations took their idea for their own self servicing promotional pollution! The LED Throwies consist of some mini LED lights, magnets, batteries and tape. They stick to metal things! As attendees of the workshop, we gathered around tables and pieced together little alien like light devices in preparation to thrown them around. Unfortunately I have no photos from this but I encourage you to visit their site to find out more about this and other excellent projects they are involved with. It so happens that my next highlight was also with G.R.L. laser tagging Boland’s Mill down in Grand Canal Dock on Saturday night. I ventured over after checking out The Hive, which was a very cool reactionary light exhibition in in Grand Canal Square. I was very impressed by Laser Tag and the ethos behind doing such a thing. I had seen this on the web before and was thrilled to hear that G.R.L. were bringing this to Dublin and it was nice to meet such free minded visionaries. I have since got myself up and running with their amazing Open Source software fro making this magic happen and example of which can be seen here from when I got it up and running in my studio on Sunday evening. I may need a better laser to take it outdoors, but other then that it all works amazingly. Major Kudos to G.R.L.

The main Lightwave exhibition at the Science Gallery has been extended until March 1st due to phenomenal demand. It is open from Tuesday–Sunday, 5pm until 9pm and there is no admission price. The gallery is situated in the new Naughton Institute building on Pearse St. See the light, be illuminated!

Below are some photos featuring The Hive and GRL. Or, you can go straight to the set of Flickr via this LINK