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colour, language,
time and possibility

as interconnected fields
of artistic research

artworks
painting, writing, calculating, transcoding

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installations
available, archive, in progress

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public art
public space, indoor, ongoing, proposals

public art conceived as :
 

# Urban Signs
# Displays of Emergence
# Sensing Architectures

# Generative Structures

forms:

# urban signs
# sculptural landmarks
# memorial places
# architectural interventions

Palimpsest

Wijkpark De Porre, Ghent, Belgium

2019

LAb[au], Manuel Abendroth, Jérôme Decock, Els Vermang

36 custom tailored sixteen segment displays and electronics, iron structure

abstract

Palimpsest is a public artwork intended for the cooling tower of a former industrial site in Ghent, Belgium. The artwork constitutes two circular displays - one at the top of the chimney and the other at the bottom. The lower ring displays the process - the generation of random letters, while the upper one displays the result - words that have been randomly created by combinatorial logic. The overwriting of found words on the top ring follows the palimpsest principle in a digital display, proposing an autopoietic light sign in a landscape made of industrial, functional constraints, inviting passers-by to participate in interpretation and reading.

credits

special thanks:
Walter Wathieu, technical assistance

text

Def: Palimpsest: In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document

history

LAb[au] has been winning in 2010 the open call for the public art competition for the cooling tower of the former textile factory in De Porre, Ghent.. After multiple proposals, budget cut downs, the actual project has been realised in 2019.

public artworks by the Belgian artstudio LAb[au], laboratory for art and urbanism, atr&language, art&architecture crossing conceptual art, kinetic art, digital art, konkrete

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