Outside the entrance to the testing hall at Örebro University, the artist Izabel Lind has created Stream – an interactive outdoor sculpture. The work’s LED screen live-streams the activity on Campus Örebro through data collected from thousands of sensors deployed in the area.
Stream consists of a sculptural wave-shaped metal mesh that carries a grid of LED points where physical materiality meets the information flow of the digital pixel points.
One of the starting points for the artwork was the ongoing collaborative project Örebro Campus Lab, where the university campus is equipped with over 4,000 sensors that measure light, temperature, humidity and movement. The sensors enable the use of the premises in a more sustainable and efficient way while improving the indoor environment and energy use.
A Portrait of the Örebro University Campus
Stream can be seen as a portrait of the Örebro University campus, which through the sensors, among other things, reproduces the movements of the places and how people meet and integrate with each other, and translates the data into a light animation. The more activity and movement that takes place in the area, the more colour, form and intensity is generated on the wavy LED sculpture. The pixels in the grid together create an overall picture. Like every person who moves and interacts here, we all contribute to the atmosphere and community that is unique to this place.
Artist’s Biography Izabel Lind
Izabel Lind (b. 1991) works in the tension zone between sculptural materiality and digital media where she often revisits themes related to time, transience and dreams. An example of this is the work Separate Entities, where viewers use VR glasses to see a virtual representation of the space where the work is placed. In the virtual world the viewer experiences dream-like displacements, additions and events that create a hallucinatory uncertainty about what is real and what is imaginary. The work is an expression of the contemporary material world in which we all find ourselves, between body, materiality, truth, appearance, imagination and experience.
