Creating a celebration of light, lighting designer Paul Cocksedge has used 80 ETC Selador Classic Ice fixtures in an exhibition space as part of the Salone del Mobile home furnishing exhibition in Milan.
The project involved projecting light from the blue part of the colour spectrum from concealed Selador fixtures onto a the 25m long, curved, white wall extension of a lighting showroom in the heart of Milan’s design district; when visitors viewed the wall through a red light shade, a previously hidden video of a car appeared to the viewer.
“I was very ambitious about what I was proposing; we were really pushing the boundaries of what is achievable,” said Cocksedge. “I wanted a lot of light, and a very certain, precise light. Only the Selador Ice unit gave that precision: other manufacturers gave what the eye perceived was the same, but when you look closely at it, wasn’t exactly right. When I first came up with the idea to use light in this way, I was put in touch with Adam Bennette at ETC, who became our colour consultant. I’ve known and worked with him for many years, and ETC is often one of my first points of contact for brainstorming ideas.”
“The car is invisible until when you view it from inside a shade,” said Bennette, technical director at ETC. “For this effect to work, we needed to have a very specific cyan blue.”
“ETC Selador fixtures, with their x7 Color System, have three different shades of blue LEDs in them – cyan, blue and indigo – which can create very specific and pure shades with a very high degree of saturation,” he continued, “whereas many other manufacturers’ fixtures make intermediate shades by mixing only green, blue and red.”
The fixtures were supplied by rental company Volume in Milan for the exhibition stand. Some 300,000 people attended the show from 154 countries. The Salone was established in 1961 to promote Italian furniture and furnishing accessories on the export market, and has since become a benchmark for the country’s furniture sector.
