red dot: grand prix: "Duality" by ART+COM, Berlin

Traditionally, there has always been a certain tension between art for public spaces, with its architectural associations, and the actual surroundings of a building: On the one hand, this close connection to the building limits the creative freedom, but on the other hand it is also its challenge. Installations that make use of new media and technologies today offer their designers the possibility to establish entirely novel relationships with architecture. And not only with the architecture: also with the people who live and function within it. Developed for a new building complex in the centre of Tokyo, the “Duality” installation responds to the impulses of passers-by.

The action of stepping on a six-metre-square area generates real-time virtual light waves that extend as real waves on the surface of the adjacent artificial pond. The installation aims to offer commuters flowing out of a nearby metro station a playful moment of pause and meditation; furthermore, “Duality” explores the interplay between solid and liquid, virtual and real, light waves and water waves, and is intended to counter the generic practice of architecture art with a concept that evokes identification by instantaneously implying both the location and the human beings that are present in it.


Joachim Sauter on “Media in public spaces”:

“Duality” is an installation in a public place in the city centre of Tokyo. The aim was to create an installation that, unlike many other medial art projects for public spaces, would interact with its environment thematically and react physically to passers-by. Set up as part of a walkway and an adjacent artificial pond, “Duality” acts as an interface between “liquid” (water) and “solid” (walkway), expanded by the aspects of “real” (waves of water) and “virtual” (waves of light). Due to the reactive nature of the installation, passers-by change the environment and thus experience a moment of identity with the place.


ART+COM was founded in Berlin in 1988 by designers, scientists, artists and technologists. The design office for new media translates content, staging them within given spaces by means of interactive media in order to make complex subjects readily accessible in museums, exhibitions, visitor and science centres, as well as trade fairs and other public areas. Today the 70-strong interdisciplinary team realises projects for clients in culture, industry and research – from screen applications to interactive installations and medial spaces, from the first stage of developing ideas to the final design and technical implementation.

Joachim Sauter, creative director and co-founder of ART+COM, studied design at the Berlin University of the Arts as well as film direction and photography at the dffb, the German film and television academy in Berlin. Since starting his career as an artist he has been using computers as a tool and medium. Since 1991 he has been a professor for art and design with digital media at Berlin University of the Arts, and since 2001 also an adjunct professor for media design and media art at the University of California, Los Angeles.