At the intersection of order and chaos, life happens.
States of energy spring into existence, fluctuate, collapse
And rise again in new configurations.
You come into this world, you grow, you change, you thrive
Then move back to potentiality, closing the circle of life.
In this installation we back-project an oscilloscope screen onto a huge old GDR movie spotlights fresnel lens and bring it to life with a very special animation, made by sound.
We use "Osci-Render" by James H. Ball to create sounds that directly translate into images by mapping the left channel to the X-axis and the right channel to the Y-axis of the virtual oscilloscope screen.
So what you hear is what you see!
The sound you hear is literally what paints the images.
To be able to project onto the 70cm fresnel lens (instead of all light going through), we spread a very thin layer of white pigment on the backside with a bit of water and a paintbrush in one long spiraling stroke.
The fresnel lens still tries to focus the light, which results in a kind of "sparkling" when viewed from directly in front of the lens.
Built in 1970, this spotlight was used in major movie productions in the filmstudios in Berlin/Adlershof and on location.
It's 20,000 watt lightbulb, with a height of 60cm including the socket and a diameter of about 38cm uses a ~1mm thick filament and is really just an upscaled version of the standard lightbulbs we used to have in our homes. It was created at the "Narva" factories and could even have been blown manually. I once visited the factory in Berlin shortly after the fall of the wall and it was quite impressive how much work was done by actual humans instead of machines.
Interestingly, the inside of the bulb becomes covered with soot by extended use and the nothing but ingenious and practical engineers of the GDR came up with a very hands-on solution:
Inside of the bulb there is a handful of black, sharp grains of - we guess - corundum with which, by moving the bulb in a circular motion, you can clean the inner surface manually. How amazing is that!
Another feature of the spotlight is, that it can be turned on in three steps. For that, there are two large wire-resistors built into the bottom of the spotlight, each measuring 38 x 14 x 3 cm. The big rotating switch takes quite some power to go from zero to three.
We were told by former employees of the DFF that the bulbs tended to burn through when switched on in one step, so as I understood it, the switch was more about extending the lifetime of the bulb than for having three levels of lighting power.
The spotlight rests on a sturdy rotating steel frame. It also features two rings on top to use it "flying" from a crane.
The front also sports lugs to use barndoors, but we do not have those.
One last thing of interest: Behind the lightbulb there is a spherical mirror made of polished aluminium and it can be moved back and forth on two rails with a handlebar to change the focus and make the beam wider or more concentrated. It being a fresnel lens, the beam of course is never really sharp, but nicely fuzzy and soft.
You can also watch the videos on YouTube in higher resolution:
· Metamorphosis · Big Oscilloscope ·