Circle of mirroring steel branches composes a luminous forest in Hanoi.

12 hours ago7 min read3 comments

In the heart of Hanoi, an installation of mirror-polished steel branches forms a luminous forest, a public art piece where reflections shift dynamically with the changing sunlight and weather, creating an ever-evolving dialogue between the built environment and the natural world. This isn't merely sculpture; it's a sophisticated user interface for experiencing light, a tangible algorithm where the sun acts as the primary user, inputting data through its daily arc across the sky, and the artwork processes this input, outputting a continuous, real-time light show across its faceted surfaces.The artist, functioning as a creative technologist, has coded this experience not in Python or JavaScript, but in the physical language of form and materiality, crafting an interactive canvas that responds to its environmental variables. One can draw a direct parallel to generative art tools like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, where a simple prompt yields a unique, unrepeatable image; here, the prompt is the time of day, the cloud cover, the season itself, and the AI—the artwork—generates a corresponding visual output that is ephemeral and impossible to fully capture.The choice of steel, often perceived as cold and industrial, is subverted through its high-polish finish, transforming it into a medium of warmth and connection, much like how AI design plugins in Figma are transforming static wireframes into dynamic, responsive prototypes. This luminous forest acts as a physical plugin for the urban landscape, enhancing the city's visual codebase with a new function that renders beauty from atmospheric data.Historically, public art has been monolithic and static—a bronze statue impervious to its surroundings. This installation, however, belongs to a new paradigm of responsive public realms, akin to the work of teamLab or Olafur Eliasson, where the viewer's presence and the environment's flux are integral to the piece's completion.It challenges the very definition of a static object, presenting instead a living system, a dataset of light and reflection that is never the same twice. For the citizens of Hanoi, it offers a daily lesson in perception, a reminder that our reality is not a fixed image but a fluid composition, constantly being re-rendered by the conditions around us. The potential consequences are profound for urban design, suggesting a future where our parks and plazas are not just designed, but are programmed to interact, to learn from their context, and to generate unique, personalized experiences for every passerby, effectively turning the entire city into an intelligent, artistic interface.

#featured

#public art

#installation

#mirror steel

#Hanoi

#Tia Thuy Nguyen

#luminous forest

#designboom

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