StiX Cubed

I made the original version of StiX Cubed for the Lunacy Festival in October 2012. I’d had the idea in my head for quite some time, years in fact and finally decided that the time was right.
It originated when I’d been putting together Unstable Reality. A friend had brought several heavily saturated celestial images to the Pescadrome (one of the places we traditionally make art). By chance a color changing LED light was pointing down at the picture. The picture changed its look based upon the color coming from the light; when red was the dominant color, for example, any color related to it sprang to life and all others muted considerably or became dark. We used the effect for Walkabout Woods but it was a secondary idea. I wanted to make something that from beginning to end would exploit this peculiarity of light and lighting. And so I made the Stix Cubed. Accompanied by some corollary ideas from Dominique Reboul, they took on the look of an enormous game of pick up sticks, at least during the day. It was at night that the installation came to life.  It went wild under flashes of ever changing light making it all but impossible to decipher the absolute nature of each color.

Stix Cubed from JOn Smith on Vimeo.