LED art
LED art is light art constructed from light-emitting diodes - the small, cheap, brilliantly colored light sources that became ubiquitous in the late twentieth century. Jenny Holzer brought the medium into the museum in the early 1980s with scrolling electronic signs carrying her texts, from the spiral sign wound around the Guggenheim's rotunda in 1989 to the LED installations that won her the Golden Lion at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Since then the LED has served gallery artists (Leo Villareal's coded light sculptures such as Multiverse, 2008), public commissions, and guerrilla street artists, whose throwies and blinkies exploit the same cheapness and brightness. Programming turns the diode into a time-based material: arrays flash, chase, fade and pulse, making the work less an object than a controlled behavior of light.
Defining characteristics
- Self-luminous color: saturated points of pure-hued light that replace reflected light with emitted light
- Programmed behavior - flashing, chasing, fading, pulsing - driven by circuitry and code
- Grids, arrays, and strings of diodes composing geometric fields of light
- Works designed for darkness, where the light itself becomes the image
- Cheap, mass-produced components enabling disposable guerrilla pieces (throwies, blinkies) as well as museum installations
Key figures
- Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) — Neo-conceptual artist whose scrolling LED text works (Guggenheim 1989, Venice Biennale 1990) made the medium central to contemporary art
- Leo Villareal (b. 1967) — Combines LEDs with custom computer code for large light sculptures (Multiverse, The Bay Lights)
Example works
- Laments — Jenny Holzer (1989)
- Multiverse — Leo Villareal (2008)
- The Bay Lights — Leo Villareal (2013)
Sources
- LED art - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Light art - Wikipedia encyclopedia