The NUS School of Design and Environment (SDE) is participating in NUS Centre For The Arts’ HERE! 2016, and selected works from their project Groove Light are now on display at the Alice Lee Plaza till 19 August.

Groove Light is a project by a team of 11 fourth-year Architecture students led by Assistant Professor Shinya Okuda from SDE’s Department of Architecture, along with supervisors, Associate Professor Joseph Lim and Associate Professor Cheah Kok Ming.

Invited to iLIGHT Marina Bay 2016, Groove Light is centered on the light festival’s theme – Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s novel In Praise of Shadows – expressing favours of obliqueness over brightness as one of the characters of Asian culture over Western clarity.

The project evokes provocative relationships between light and shadow, and explores how advanced computational technologies could open up new dimensions of lighting in the near future. Groove Light consists of five distinctively complex lanterns – Submarine, Cliff, Seashell, Lighthouse and Coral – which are realised through innovative designs, computational simulations and state-of-the-art fabrication technologies.

Physicalized by one of the largest commercially available 3D printers, the lanterns are positioned to cast precisely the same geometric shadows, creating an optical illusion as if they were floating above a continuous geometric shadow carpet. Visitors can pull or rotate each lantern to distort the shadows and change the lightscape created by the lanterns.

Groove Light also uses low-energy LED lighting, and biodegradable plastic lanterns. The recyclable 3D printed lanterns can then be melted down and re-extruded as filament for next round of large-scale 3D printings.