dream bubble machinedream bubble machine
Room installation with projections on soap bubbles
Together with Fabricius Seifert
Supervised by Prof. Roland Lambrette
A dark room with a raw, restless machine. It produces soap bubbles filled with smoke and projected images. The contents are hard to recognize, they are moving, flickering and finaly inevitably dying. Shown are images of a fortune-uniformed media landscape, that build dreams as fast as it destroys them. The installation makes light not only visible at the emitter and where it hits an object, but also in the space between. The emerging flying, bodiless images appear as if they were painted in the air with light.
The Dream Bubble Machine was developed by Lorenz Potthast and Fabricius Seifert at the course Light Laboratory, thaught by Prof. Roland Lambrette at the University of the Arts Bremen. The topic of the course was to explore light als design element, to experiment with it and to generate new applications. From the beginning our group was very interested to find ways to make light visible spatially and not only where it´s normally perceivable: At the emitter and surfaces it shines on. From this thoughts we began to experiment with different materials and fluids and ended up using smoke as carrier medium, narrowed down by the fragile hull of a soap bubble.
For our first Prototype we invented a combination of a fog- and a bubble machine. A bellow creates the bubbles by blowing the smoke through a tube, which was moistened with soapy water before. This can be done manually by hand or automatically with a motor.
To enable the cameratracking in the dark, the soap bubbles are illuminated with infrared light and also filmed with an IR camera. The position, size and movement of each bubble is recognized by a program written in the visual programming toolkit vvvv. Finaly a short-distance beamer projects the images on the calculated positions and thereby makes the bubbles glow.
Based on the basic idea of the flying, bodiless images we experimented with a huge range of possible contents (colors, drawings, typography, animation). The motifs are variable, but always connected to the idea of bursting dreams. In the beginning our content was very direct and we used stereotypical images of social ideals. Over time we developed a more sophisticated approach about the relation between individual and collective, between dreams and wishes.
For the most recent exhibition we were working together with some illustratorsand the Bremen based sound artist Kevin Kerney who developed a who developed drawings and sound specifically for our installation.