Timo Lejeune and Julius Oosting are the founders of Lumus Instruments. Having worked on light and sound installations for several years, the duo founded their creative studio in 2018. At first, their practice centred around festival-related artworks: an active breeding ground for audiovisual installations and talent. Feeling limited by the type of technologies that they found in festival spaces, Lejeune and Oosting started focusing on modular installations – multi-purpose elements that they could use in different ways – that would be durable but also allow for a certain playfulness. It is from this marriage of play (ludus), light (lumens), and the creation of their installations that their practice was born, taking the name of Lumus Instruments. 

Nxt: Can you tell us about your installation at Nxt Museum, ‘POLYNODE VIII’?

TIMO: The series of ‘POLYNODE’ essentially started in a residency with Boris Acket at Monopol in Berlin last year. We wanted to make an installation with a specific kind of playfulness that works like an instrument, like a system, not only in terms of the hardware but also in terms of the software or how it behaves. That was when we came up with the idea of using virtual and physical nodes to create behaviour in this abstract, three-dimensional shape.

JULIUS: ‘POLYNODE’ is an instrument of light. We started experimenting with Max Frimout for a show in Groningen, and took the idea to the residency in Berlin.. We wanted to explore the interaction of light with virtual nodes. What you see in ‘POLYNODE’ is that the audio responds to the light interacting with itself. That was a very fundamental exploration that we’ve been doing over the numerous iterations of the installation.

Nxt: Where do you draw inspiration from? 

JULIUS: We draw inspiration from many different topics, but I think there are a few things that we are both excited about. One of those is technological advancements. This triggers both of us, and we draw much inspiration from sci-fi and futuristic cinema. When you combine that with our background in electronic music, you come pretty close to what is ‘POLYNODE’ and Lumus more generally. Our backgrounds in design and architecture, in combination with our interests, really flow together to create this spatial vibe and style.

TIMO: I had a very interesting talk with Boris [Acket], and I told him that my main influence, or vision for the future, is ‘Star Wars’. That was a joke, but not really. When you think about it, it’s a very positive future where technology creates an adventurous space in which many different beings live and interact. It’s a very different vision to ‘Alien’, for example, where everything is industrious and dystopian. What we try to do is to create something that doesn’t exist yet, that could live in this kind of universe, and maybe inspire people to use technology in a way that builds towards that kind of future, instead of a ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Alien’ kind of future.

Nxt: What does this optimistic future vision sound like to you?

TIMO: The sound design itself doesn’t have the characteristics of optimism. It has more characteristics of a dystopian vision and feel, which we think initially speak to the imagination of the observer. The composition overall – its evolution and story – portrays a more optimistic stance. When you’re there in the space, there is this entity, this object that triggers your curiosity towards its relation to you, as well as its function. It makes you wonder, ‘Why is it here?’ and then you start to think about the motivations of the people who made it.

JULIUS: When you see people watching it, you can see that they are moved. They are involved. People are feeling somehow connected to the installation. Watching the people connect to themselves and their emotions while they watch the installation is a very beautiful thing to see happening – to see people enjoying life, their surroundings, their options, and their possibilities. That’s what radiates optimism. While the audio is not directly connected to that optimism, it is meant to trigger it.

‘POLYNODE VIII’ at Nxt Museum.

Nxt: The main theme of the work is portraying unseen digital systems. Could you touch on those themes and your motivations?

TIMO: The physicality of the work is very important to us. We ask, ‘How do these things come to life in a physical form?’. We are very much focused on the embodiment of technology. A lot of technology is not embodied; it is content on a flat screen or projection. We like to question how a technology embodies itself in space. We try to search for this fundamental connection, essentially.

JULIUS: A lot of our story and our work is about the way we think about light, but also the physicality of space. For us, it’s really important to show that the digital world is not only a file but also an existence. It’s there. That’s also why the work is called ‘POLYNODE’; our digital world is an immense network of nodes that are interactive and activated. That’s what’s happening all the time. Nodes are being activated to fulfil our digital needs. The nodes of ‘POLYNODE’ are visualised, but they’re also physical in the sense that they move, they change. In that sense, this installation portrays that interaction, the story of our digital world in a physical sense.

JULIUS: I mean, your average data centre is just a black box somewhere, to put it bluntly. Those are the important nodes of our world. In our artwork, those nodes are portrayed, but data centres have no visual cues to what they actually do. It’s very dystopian. And there’s like a cute cat video running on it, you know?

TIMO: I think it’s very unpoetic how these technologies and their physicality are generally approached. When you see this kind of data centre, it’s moving towards the dystopian, where its shape and how we interact with it doesn’t have to do anything with what it’s doing. We are very embodied creatures. We live in this three-dimensional world. We touch things, we hear things, we see things, and then we create invisible things, very much distant from our reality. We try to make sense of them and hope that we can interact with them and live together with them. At Lumus Instruments, we think it’s a nice approach to make things resonate more with how we physically experience them. And this is really what ‘POLYNODE’ searches for.

Nxt: Bringing it back to the theme with electronic music – that world of festival and club culture. Could you talk about your relationship with that world and how it influences your work?

JULIUS: Our work is about bringing digital worlds into the physical realm and creating physical experiences. One of the most physical experiences we have is going to a place where you can dance, where you can experience light and sound that trigger all your senses at any time. It is not only the big speakers that make the experience physical, but also the way the light interacts with sound and responds to it.

TIMO: We also felt very limited by the existing technology that we could use to control lighting for clubs and festivals. So, we made an instrument of our own. In our process, we first design and make an instrument, and then we actually play with it. We program everything with an element of playfulness in it so we can really explore during the show.

‘Contrarium’ July 24, 2020. Photo by Rachel Margaretha Ecclestone

Nxt: Can you tell us about this exploration through ‘POLYNODE VIII’ as a residency at Nxt Museum?

TIMO: Up until now, all ‘POLYNODE’s have been very temporary. To be able to show it for a longer time is also really important for us, because then you can build a more significant connection with the piece. We’ve created multiple ‘POLYNODE’s, and it’s come to this point where, in the current form, we’ve seen it many times. We’ve tried numerous things, and now we feel that it’s time for a change in how it’s made physically, but also in how it behaves. Now that we’ve spent a lot of time on the physicality of the work, we can focus on the behavioural side and the computational core, as well as the fundamental ways it functions.

JULIUS: One of the nice things about exhibiting in a museum is that you have control. You have complete control over your space, over your environment, over your audio. In a more club-like environment, with installations and in stages, you don’t have control. You can’t say what music is going to be played, what you’re going to hear, what other surrounding audio and lights are going to be there. It’s a very different environment, but both have unique characters that are nice to work with. Now we can explore where we want to go. We can see what’s next. I think that the interplay between the expected and unexpected is very important for us to experience. And it’s lovely to exhibit this piece – which I think is our most important and exciting piece – here at Nxt, in our hometown; to be here in this local institution as local artists.