My name is Iwa Ruki, I'm one of three founding partners of Troika.
My other two partners are called Crony Friar and Sebastian Noel.
We started Troika in about 2003, just after we graduated from the Royal College of Art,
so we've almost been going for 10 years now.
At the moment we are based in a railway arch of Kingsland Road, the reason why we are based
in a railway arch you can extrapolate from what you can see behind me.
In 2010 we decided to take a lot of the fabrication of our large scale immersive art installations
in-house.
This workshop we set up is quite a flexible space, so there is design bits, clean work
in the front normally, so light boxes in the back, that's really the core workshop, but
then in the fabrication period everything becomes a workshop, everything is extended,
all the tables are on wheels, so it remains quite a flexible space.
The things which I'm going to show today, they have not only been designed in Hackney,
but they have also quite often been made in Hackney.
First one is the installation we did for Selfridges.
They really wanted a light installation, and we thought, well, okay, the thing which we
are always really interested asked about light was the speed of light.
So we designed this rotary light installation, and what you see here in the front, these
are LED bands which are on the outside of these structures, and they are rotating so
fast that in actual fact it looks as if there are these solid volumes of light.
We had eight of these structures, all of which were suspended in the atrium of Selfridges
for three months.
It's basically the atrium space is a 28 meter drop, so each of these installations is about
two meter high.
A couple of different designs, we were also quite fascinated by the notion of white and
what white light is, because of course there are so many different temperatures to light,
sort of played a little bit with that range that is available from cool light to warm light,
giving us very subtle differences to the different structures.
There are four different designs, and we had two columns which featured each for different
design.
They stretched over five different stories and were always located in between those different
stories, so people had different vantage points from which they could sort of see the works.
What you can't see here is that these pieces were sort of alternating, so sometimes all
of them were on, sometimes two were on, and sometimes three were on, and the reason for
that is because one of the most magic points for me in this installation is when the structure
starts spinning and then as this point has been so fast that it forms a solid volume.
What you can see here is for the first test where we need to solve the vibration which
occurs within the structure, I mean it's a 28 meter drop, so as you have four different
structures which all spin at different speeds and to different times, you can see on the
bottom that there is quite a lot of movement building up.
That's something which is actually really interesting to us, all of these challenges
which are queues throughout the development process, another thing was that we started
to work quite closely together with the scientists from Cambridge University to make sure that
there were no problems in terms of epilepsy because obviously you have quite all these
lights obviously pulsed at a certain rate, so if they're spinning and form the stripe
pattern that's quite a challenge there to solve.
Very briefly I wanted to address a project which is called the Lightrain which was initially
developed for the bridge pavilion in Shanghai which was designed by Thomas Hasevik and
we developed three installations for that.
We then developed it further because it was designed for an outside space and we figured
there was a little bit of scope to refine the actual design and then developed it further
for a commission of Swarovski which can still now be seen in the BNA for the bridge design
exhibition to expose the whole workings in a workings of a mechanism and the way this
device works.
I said you have a lens, a light and the light comes closer to the lens and further apart
and this has an animation written into the mechanism which is basically a raindrop.
So this is the final installation where this process sort of ended up and what we are trying
to do in a lot of our work is really to create immersive experience, things which make people
stop and sort of reconsider things they have already known but see them in a different
light.
I think this installation does this really well because it has these sort of opposites
of technology which is perceived as something of an artificial, of a man-made which is coming
together with something like an innate memory of nature as everybody had as a kid watching
raindrops on the water.
So that's one section of our work to create sort of lasting memory which is sort of referring
as opposed to something bigger outside yourself and then there's another strength which is
slightly more humorous, we were sort of talking about the weather and about the way everybody
is so dependent on technology to tell them about their life and how they are feeling
so looking at the weather and figuring what we really needed is also a piece that tells
us how we were yesterday and what the weather was like yesterday.
So that was the commission which came along from Riva on the GLA for Hoxton Square and
this is an installation we built called the Weather Yesterday which is linked to yesterday's
weather forecast.
There's sort of slightly a retro look, it's not really a stylistic choice but it's based
on the components the sign is built with.
We have this LED strip which comes in modules of five so the entire sign is based on that.
It's a little bit of a rough and ready approach, we really take these LED strips a little bit
like tape almost again that gets implemented in the graphic part where we developed a small
alphabet which uses the same system.
That's a back of the sign where you can see the circuitry so quite a lot of our works
uses software programming controls as well as typical physical design, lighting design.
These are the first tests in our studio, now it's installed in Hoxton Square, we hope to
extend a little bit longer to the end of October, what is probably the nicest for us is to see
when our work comes into sort of reality and becomes part of the space and place and makes
a difference to the way people are actually using it and in particular in Hoxton Square
what is really nice is that they're apparently leaving the park now a little longer open
because people are sitting around there because there's now a light and they just stay and
gather and talk for a little bit longer, that's it.
