Over the last ten years, London's Trafalgar Square has become a setting for a sequence of contemporary artworks by Antony Gormley, Thomas Schütte and the square itself for Installations by Tom Dixon and Jaime Hayon during the London Design Festival.
Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram have been commissioned to design this year's Trafalgar Square Installation which will be on view from September 17 to 23. Their project, entitled Outrace, empowers the general public to take control of eight large-scale industrial robots on loan from Audi’s manufacturing line.
Outrace is a popup factory, a temporary production facility for writing holographic messages. Visitors to Trafalgar Square and a remote global public can take control over eight magnificent robotic tentacles by logging onto the project website with a mobile device or computer and broadcasting a short text message which is then ingeniously transcribed as real-time light traces.
The light heads attached to the synchronized mechanical arms make use of LED technology from the Audi R15 TDI race car, winner of this year’s 24h of LeMans. The heads trace letters in the air with spectacular precision and elegant determination. As a user’s message is drawn, the light trace is simultaneously recorded through a system of high definition, long-exposure cameras, encoded as a video and relayed back to be shared across social media.
