Iregular Unveils Monumental Interactive Public Art Installation, SOLSTICE

Digital art studio Iregular has announced the launch of its latest digital public art installation, SOLSTICE, running until February 24th at Discovery Green in Houston, Texas.

SOLSTICE embodies Iregular’s ethos of combining interaction and audience experience to reflect and transmit concepts and meanings. Designed to disturb the perception of your surroundings, SOLSTICE makes you lose sense of where you actually are, somewhere between reflections, parallel dimensions and reality. A stretch of doorway-sized frames lead to a central luminous rotating fixture: the sun. Large mirrors facing each other are placed parallel to the frames, extending the space with infinite reflections. All frames and mirrors glow thanks to controllable lights, and each frame also has integrated speakers, playing an accompanying reactive soundscape.

The 250 foot interactive piece requires the audience’s collaborative strength to take control of the environment and the experience of others by interrupting the normal rotation of the sun and turning it towards a specific angle. As a result, colours and sounds smoothly change throughout the whole space.

The piece aims to explore the far-reaching consequences of human actions - a ripple effect manifests as an audiovisual reverberation, triggered when someone rotates the sun. Just as the sun affects moods, seasons, and nature, our individual decisions have effects on a global scale. Whilst we often think about how our choices can have negative repercussions on the planet, the changes we can implement as individuals have the power to influence the environment in a positive way too, and the audience-activated sound and landscape transformation of the wondrous SOLSTICE space serves as the perfect metaphor for this.

Daniel Iregui, digital artist and founder of Iregular, comments: “When you look at SOLSTICE, you see a lot of the graphical language I like to work with: repetition, frames inside frames, patterns. We strive to craft systems that allow humans to feel expressive and creative. It’s all about visualising impact, and it’s super empowering - you’re interacting with something massive, and you feel like you have an influence on the space. We love that as a metaphor for how we can affect our lives and those of others.”