CONVERGE
Type: Laser-Sound Installation
Medium: Rhino + Grasshopper + Laser + Audio
Material: Laser + Sound
Year: 2025
Medium: Rhino + Grasshopper + Laser + Audio
Material: Laser + Sound
Year: 2025
The Concept
CONVERGE is a site-specific laser-sound installation on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s south façade—a civic threshold that functions as the city’s primary site of political assembly and community gathering. Engaging the building’s layered history, the work constructs ephemeral light sculptures formed through precise laser intersections.
Rigid stone columns are transformed into a permeable volume of haze, capturing laser light through mirror-based reflections to generate fleeting geometric forms—where light simultaneously accentuates and destabilizes institutional architecture. Light does not merely illuminate; it renegotiates. These geometries offer a framework through which viewers can trace ever-shifting paths of light, reflecting individual trajectories as they move within the communities they inhabit, articulated through a single beam.
The work proposes congregation as an active practice essential to everyday life, creating temporary conditions for being part of a collective body and for recognizing assembly as both a right and a practice of connection.
Completed as part of Interim Collective.
The Computation
Executing a high-powered laser installation on a historic civic building requires rigorous spatial planning to guarantee both visual impact and public safety. To map the complex beam paths before arriving on site, a highly accurate digital twin of the Vancouver Art Gallery facade was built using Rhino. Grasshopper was then utilized to parametrically simulate the dynamic laser trails and calculate the exact mirror placement required across the stone columns. This computational pre-visualization allowed the team to test intersection angles, predict the volumetric behaviour of the haze, and resolve the geometric light sculptures entirely in a virtual environment. By digitizing the site constraints and simulating the bounce trajectories, the physical installation was de-risked before load-in, ensuring the live lasers interacted safely and predictably with both the heritage architecture and the public crowd.
CONVERGE is a site-specific laser-sound installation on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s south façade—a civic threshold that functions as the city’s primary site of political assembly and community gathering. Engaging the building’s layered history, the work constructs ephemeral light sculptures formed through precise laser intersections.
Rigid stone columns are transformed into a permeable volume of haze, capturing laser light through mirror-based reflections to generate fleeting geometric forms—where light simultaneously accentuates and destabilizes institutional architecture. Light does not merely illuminate; it renegotiates. These geometries offer a framework through which viewers can trace ever-shifting paths of light, reflecting individual trajectories as they move within the communities they inhabit, articulated through a single beam.
The work proposes congregation as an active practice essential to everyday life, creating temporary conditions for being part of a collective body and for recognizing assembly as both a right and a practice of connection.
Completed as part of Interim Collective.
The Computation
Executing a high-powered laser installation on a historic civic building requires rigorous spatial planning to guarantee both visual impact and public safety. To map the complex beam paths before arriving on site, a highly accurate digital twin of the Vancouver Art Gallery facade was built using Rhino. Grasshopper was then utilized to parametrically simulate the dynamic laser trails and calculate the exact mirror placement required across the stone columns. This computational pre-visualization allowed the team to test intersection angles, predict the volumetric behaviour of the haze, and resolve the geometric light sculptures entirely in a virtual environment. By digitizing the site constraints and simulating the bounce trajectories, the physical installation was de-risked before load-in, ensuring the live lasers interacted safely and predictably with both the heritage architecture and the public crowd.
