Aether & Hemera, Voyage, Canary Wharf, London. until February 13 2013

Aether & Hemera’s Voyage is an installation consists of three hundred floating ‘paper boats’, encasing coloured dynamic LED lights in the Middle Dock of Canary Wharf. The aim of the creator’s artistic vision is “to provoke memories, explore aesthetic interactions and to elicit feelings of connective human experiences in a required-to-participate audience.” The installation is designed to be interactive and people can change the colour of the lights via their mobile phone.

The etymon of the word ‘voyage’ comes from Latin ’viāticum’, which means ’provision for travelling’, and the aim of the artwork is to allow viewers to travel and sail with absolute freedom to all the places they care to imagine.Colourful paper boats’ on the water invites everyone to make a transition from reality to imagination, reliving childhood memories and embracing our freedom; blurring the lines between the real and hyper-real, ‘Voyage’ invites the thoughts of the visitors to cross the borders of their imagination.

Aether & Hemera are the ancient Greek god and goddess of brighter upper air and daylight. Aether is Claudio Benghi, the media architect; Hemera is Gloria Ronchi, the lighting artist. Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Aether & Hemera is “an interdisciplinary collaboration to research the aesthetic challenges of light and its power to trigger emotions and response, creating a sense of identity or setting a mood. This cross-disciplinary cooperation focuses on researching the sensory engagement power of an immaterial force like light and how collaborative participatory arts and design methods can influences our way of living in a variety of contexts, scaling from interiors to urban spaces.”

Commissioned for Winter Lights as part of Canary Wharf Group’s public art programme of temporary and permanent visual arts.

Images: Photography: ©Philip Vile, ©Ian Docwra,

http://www.aether-hemera.com/Blog/2012/12/19?Id=Voyage__a_journey_into_imagination