Candela

Candela for London Design Festival

V&A’s Tapestry Gallery, London

September 2014

Candela is an immersive installation placed within the V&A’s tapestry galleries, one of the darkest spaces within the museum. Millimetre worked with the design team of product designer Felix de Pass, graphic designer Michael Montgomery, ceramicist Ian McIntyre and Howard Eaton Lighting to develop the design for manufacturing and facilitate the construction and installation of the piece.

The title of the installation, Candela, comes from the standard unit of luminous intensity: a common candle emits light with a luminous intensity of roughly one candela. The structure is a continually rotating disc coated in electro luminescent paint which is charged by a bank of programmable high output UV LED’s. The illumination of the LED’s for different durations in a programatic sequence generated graphic patterns on the photo sensitive surface, these gradually faded until the next pass of the LED light source.