The interior of a Cambridge chapel comes alive with light in an eye-popping immersive project art installation. It’s the creation of artist Miguel Chevalier and the installation was commissioned by the University of Cambridge for a fundraiser last month — the first time the university has invited an artist to do such a project in its famed King’s College Chapel.
It was a one-time event, with speeches by such famous Cambridge alumni as Sir Ian McKellen and Sir David Attenborough, among other luminaries. But fortunately filmmaker Claude Mossessian was there to record it for posterity. In the short film below, we are introduced to the cathedral’s glorious late Gothic architecture, both inside and out.
And then we see the cathedral’s interior transformed by multi-coloured light playing off all those period details. The imagery evokes the many fields of human knowledge pursued at Cambridge (and around the world): history, literature, botany, biology, neuroscience, physics, astronomy, and finally, cosmology.
As Chevalier’s ode to the cosmos flickers on the ceiling and walls that surround the audience, Cambridge’s most famous scholar, Stephen Hawking, gives a short homage to all that the university has given to him — and to the world:
“I was lucky to be given the space to think and I chose to think about space. I was lucky to find a place in the world where I could make my mark. But neither Cambridge nor I have finished yet. To transform all of our futures, we can and we must do more, because we have many more world-changing ideas to give. But Dear World — we cannot do this without you.”
[Via Lost at E Minor]