The Light Capture

Imagine that you are walking in a zoo. You take a look inside the monkey cage and watch the chimpanzees jumping around. You go to the place where they keep the bigger animals like the elephant and the hippos and see them drinking from the pool, washing themselves and swimming around. Then suddenly you see a wooden sign, with the word 'light' written on it.
You follow the direction the sign points out and you enter a small room. The room is dark. But in the middle you see a small glass cage. You look through the glass, and you see something, that's impossible. YOUR WITNESSING 'LIGHT' TRAPPED IN A CAGE!!!
And like an aggressive lion or a mad chimpanzee in the zoo, the 'light' is restless and very unhappy being trapped in a cage. It tries to break it open by pushing and beating the glass, now and then.
It won't help. The 'light' takes a small break, but breaths restless in and out.

The question that we are asking ourselves is: how can we capture 'light'? And how does 'light' behaves when you capture it? What does 'light' feel, when you capture it? and what does 'light' think, when you capture it?
The audience enters the container and sees a cage with inside a live form existing out of 'light'.
The idea is to capture 'light' in a box and let the 'light' live inside the box, like an animal in a cage. So that we can look at it and examine its behavior... the search and control of the drama of 'light'

We are using an aquarium and fill it up with water and a small drip of milk. From one angle, we point a projector on the aquarium. The projection fills a side with its projection light.

From the projector, a simple animation appears on the side of the aquarium. It goes through the water area and end at the other side of the aquarium. All the light, that's inside the water area will be shown as a three dimensional hologram.

We are Joost Maaskant and Rene Nijman. We met each other on the drama academy of Maastricht.

Joost Maaskant (1984, Leeuwarden)
He graduated as a Performance artist and worked as an actor in different plays in Holland and Belgium. He also directed some plays and specialized himself in creating multimedia installations, multimedia scenery and human beatboxing.
To see an overview of his theater/installation work, go to: http://www.joostmaaskant.com

René Nijman (1984, The Hague)

Pursuing a wide range of interests, René has been working as an actor and attended Maastricht Theatre Academy, while starting a career as a freelance cameraman and editor. He's also an amateur engineer, finding ways to combine microcontrollers with mechanical contraptions. Website: http://www.renenijman.com

Contact:

Joost Maaskant
Nijlânsdyk 4
8931 GK Leeuwarden
Phone: 0031614509437
email: j.maask@gmail.com

Rene Nijman
Roerstraat 31
2584 TT Den Haag
Phone:0031648686598
email: renenijman@gmail.com

We try to create a computer animation out of simple geometrical images, that represents the 'light', and that acts and moves like an angry organic animal inside our self-made 'light-capture-cage'. The 'light' attempts to escape, shivers, breaths, takes small breaks, moves very aggressive.
It also reacts on input from outside, if you knock on the glass of the aquarium, the light will react...