Glowing Crystals
A few photos of the Kide sculpture.
I'm a regular visitor to Niklas Sjöblom's photoblog as he takes nice pictures from around Helsinki every day and a few weeks ago a picture of the Kide sculpture took me by surprise as I hadn't seen that since August 2000 out behind Kiasma during the day and unlit. I found another photo of them in front of the Tuomiokirkko, too. I thought it would be a great excuse to trudge out in the -15C weather to try out a new tripod and take a few photos. I arrived well after darkness had fallen so the colours were bright, but the sky didn't have any colour to it at all. I went back for a few more shots at sunset and will add those when I have them developed.
The sculpture was to have been put into storage so I was somewhat surprised to see it had found a new home out on a Ruoholahti breakwater. It has seen better days as someone has taken a marker to the cubes, some of the lights are dead and there is moisture in 2 of them. Still, they are an interesting sight in the darkness. The breakwater didn't have a fence around it so I didn't get too bold with various angles since I didn't want to slip on the ice and fall 6 meters onto more ice and into the cold, cold water. You can see Lauttasaari and it's alien spaceship/mushroom water reservoir from the sculpture as well as lots of footprints in the snow across the ice.
Crystals connecting nine Cities of Culture and European Cities of Culture for the Year 2000 [PDF] have a lot more information and background about the sculpture. The quick summary:
The sound and light sculpture Kide (Crystal), made of glass, symbolised the connection between people and cultures. 'Crystal' is the symbol project of the Helsinki City of Culture programme and a salute to the eight other Cities of Culture for 2000. In September 1999, a Crystal was installed in each of the Cities of Culture, providing a visual connection between them through a monitor near the sculpture itself. The Crystals will be returned to Helsinki before the New Year and assembled into an 18-metre tunnel of light on Senate Square; people may pass through this tunnel into the new millennium. The Crystal resembles an ice cube; it is made of laminated and reinforced glass elements. The middle one of the three glass layers is shattered; the broken glass crystals create reflections that shift as the viewer moves. The light source in the Crystal reacts to the touch of a human hand, and the light grows depending on how many people touch it. In the dark, the Crystal is lit. The colour and sound world of each Crystal reflect the city in which it is placed. The Crystal was designed by architects Kari Leppänen and Peter Ch. Butter. The visual design is by Dusan Jovanovic and the sound design by Jyrki Sandell. The glass construction is a patented Finnish invention.
20 Feb 2004 at 2:03, Helsinki
