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450 Astera NYX Bulbs for National Museum of Australia installation

A light art installation created by Ben Cisterne and comprising 450 Astera NYX Bulbs graces the ceiling of the newest “Great Southern Land” permanent gallery at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra. Cisterne was commissioned to create this special work with the exhibition designer, Fernanda Reis of Local Projects based in New York.

Cisterne, who also lit the other elements of the Great Southern Lands Gallery, has worked with the NMA Canberra team led by NMA assistant director for the Discovery & Collections division, Katherine McMahon, and Suzanne Myers responsible for management and development of the Museum’s permanent galleries, for close to twenty years. This has been at the NMA and other cultural institutions.

In this new NMA light art installation, the NYX bulbs provide a living/breathing animated and illuminated trail for guests navigating the exhibition space that is a visual contrast to the intricate, practical but still dramatic lighting of the various exhibits around the rest of the vast gallery.

Wireless DMX was vital as it was always intended to run specific video imagery through the installation as well as lighting sequences, and the controllability had to be accurate, so “Astera and wireless DMX was an obvious route”, says Cisterne.

The murmuration features two essential gently asymmetric conjoined shapes. Fernanda Reis developed the first one and Ben Cisterne the second, which consume 300 and 150 NYX Bulbs respectively. Reis also suggested some key co-ordinates and dimensions like the height of the installation and how far off the floor it should be, both to integrate with the overall gallery architecture and other exhibition elements, and for it to stand out as an artwork in its own right.

The NYX Bulbs are all hung on cloth pendant light cables. They are powered via the exhibition lighting tracks already put in place when the gallery was built, with data run over Art-Net via a Stardust CRMX controller to a Pharos touch panel interface.

In addition to the standard operating murmuration patterns running through the NYX Bulbs, some special sequences are pre-programmed for events and private functions. The video sources and lighting sequences were programmed via the Pharos FX engine.

(Photos: Louise Stickland/Paul Clarke)

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