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Ooh la light

French department store chain Galeries Lafayette has unveiled a huge new artwork in the menswear department of its flagship Boulevard Haussmann store in Paris. Designed by French artist Xavier Veilhan, Light Machine is 13m high and 9m wide and hangs behind a bank of escalators in the atrium. The artwork consists of 1536 custom-made 250mm diameter light globes containing 6144 LED lights. The globes depict a film that has been pixellated by the globes to the edge of abstraction, creating a ghostly after-image in amber and black, allowing, as Veilhan explains, ‘a more poetic and dreamlike experience’. One wonders if that idea will be extended when London’s AL_A starts remodelling the 40,000m2 store in 2017.


 

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