Triangular Grid

You can hardly have missed the fact that the Kalverpassage ceiling is forever changing. The special light ceiling you can see there is a specially designed LED light artwork by Dutch artist Sigrid Calon. She put it together with Coen Klösters, who built an app with a digital brush that Calon could use to translate her work to the screens. The LED light artwork is called “Triangular Grid”.

You could see the light ceiling as a kind of moving calendar. Calon started by putting together a palette of 365 colours, in all the shades of the primary colours red, green and blue, the RGB colours. A complicated mathematical formula makes a different pattern visible every minute. The patterns have a different direction every day of the week: diagonal, horizontal, vertical, etc. Based on the colour palette, the lamps show a different colour combination every day of the year. The computer determines which colours appear, with the combinations always meeting a prescribed balance: something fresh, something light, something dark.

Because Calon felt that “Triangular Grid” should not become a fairground attraction, seven colours can be seen per week. But you can only up to four of them at a time, and sometimes only two. The LED artwork in the Kalverpassage has so many variations in colours and patterns that no one will ever see them all. A powerful piece of technology and art.