Purple Membrane was a large-scale immersive light installation where participants interacted and experienced swimming in a cloud of light and colour in a public pool. A membrane of purple light and mist hovered over the swimming pool and as the outside light faded, the colours changed inside, the coloured membrane of mist became more and more visible, creating a unique live experience.
Tine’s vision for the installation was to create a live painting that the audience could dive and swim through – creating a membrane of water and light that transported the audiences into another world.
Originally created as part of the Camberwell Art Festival, the project transforms familiar surroundings through light and colour, creating a captivating community experience.
Kulturnat, Aarhus, Denmark 2007.
Camberwell Arts Festival, London, UK 2005.
It was one of the most successfully interactive art works I have been to, and I’ve been to a few over the years. Not only did you transform a vast area but also you shifted the way the whole space was treated as well as experienced. It was beautiful to swim in a slightly disorienting dream of fog and light for an array of reasons. For as start the fog heightened the awareness of (moonlit) wave and water by disrupting the swimmer’s vision, but also by endowing her with a comfortable anonymity… The dream was also heightened by the necessity to draw on other senses, like focusing on voices, and this created an edge of anxiety, which was therapeutic to deal with. I realised that if I tried to match my urge to call out to missing children, as I would normally look out for them, that I would spread an unnecessary panic. So that the work’s dreamy quality gave us the opportunity to relinquish control (a feature of the best installation art I think anyway).
– Althea Greenan, participant and MAKE Magazine writer