SHOW_GRID
Five-storey grid wall with various elements mounted throughout the building. The grid wall is made of steel, painted in gloss black with close correspondance to the floor made of matte/gloss chinese granite. The elements are: Light boxes: (photography, drawing, computer 3d, cad digital collage, all printed on transparency, laser-cut steel, vinyl, layered acrylic and stainless steel frames]. Signs: (computer animated LED lights, reflective 3M vinyl, acrylic, stainless steel frames). Wall painting: (acrylic painting on wall). In addition: Lamps, signage systems and cinema poster light boxes (screen print on glass, vinyl, acrylic, steel, paint).
Among the elements are animated LED I Ching signs which reflects red light onto walls and glass and makes the building alive. The old Chinese I Ching or The Book of Changes centred on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change. The text of the Book of Changes is a set of oracular statements represented by 64 sets of six lines each called hexagrams (卦 guà). Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (爻 yáo), each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.
The images in the four light boxes are meant to be swapped for new ones I make after some years. The motifs in the first ones are partly based on reconstructions of the actual architect’s CAD-drawings of this building. I also want to change the lighting technology in the light boxes to modern LED lights since the technology has evolved since this project was produced in 2001. The animation sequences of the arrow-signs are also possible to re-program after some years. This is the core of the idea of an ever-changing, media- and technology-related grid_wall that is a pulsating part of the use of the building and an integrated part of the architecture.
The silk screened glass lamps where some of them doubles as signs for the six different theatres are based on inverted photography of light shot with long exposures. The digits and the typography is set in my own font called Kewltur.
I will soon be presenting new documentation photos and HD-video of the I-Ching animations shot with the latest equipment. (March 2010).
In December 2001 in the town of Drammen inaugurated its new cinema complex and media center homing six new movie theaters (Kino City) and the offices of the local newspaper Drammens Tidende. City planning, urban development, architechture, fine arts and popular culture were important aspects of the project’s vision that would work together to create a socially stimulating media center. In the spring of 2000 two closed competitions for the embellishment of the building’s two façades and the interior were launched. Halvor Bodin won the competition for the embellishment of the interior, Britt Juul for the exterior.
Bodin’s work at Drammen Cinema & Media center was therefore created specifically for the building. The artwork was planned and executed in close collaboration with architect Anders Granli at Halvorsen & Reine. Granli designed a grid-wall – traditionally used as the building’s skeleton – to extend from the narrow main entrance straight through the open interior space to the building’s posterior. This grid creates a huge frame on which Bodin’s images rest, simultaneously providing a source of electricity for the lighting steel cases and signs.
The building’s owner is Sparebanken Øst Eiendom.
The total area of the Cinema & Media Center is 13.000 square meter.
Process documentation on Flickr.
Geolocation for this permanent installation. You can see the façade and the entrances of the Cinema complex in Google Street View. Entrance in Øvre Torggate and Øvre Storgate.