Case study · participatory light ritual

SÓL

A sun that needs a circle of dancers to wake.

Where Het Landjuweel · Ruigoord · NL When July 2026 Discipline Installation · ritual · sound

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The premise

The ritual is the interface.

A two-metre sphere of hand-cut bamboo stands on the sand, skinned in stretched fabric. It breathes slowly — red, almost asleep, visible across the field. It only wakes when people gather and dance around it. There is no button, no screen, no instruction card. To turn Sól on, a crowd has to become a circle.

Two infrared cameras read the shape of that motion and feed it into a live TouchDesigner patch. The more the circle moves together, the further Sól climbs out of sleep — from a dim red pulse toward a warm white sun burning through the haze. Stop dancing, and it slips back under. The crowd is the switch, the dimmer and the score all at once.

Behaviour

States of the object

Sól has no on/off. It has moods — a slow gradient the crowd walks it through and back again, all night, for each new group that forms.

Dormant A slow six-second red pulse. Visible across the field, but not yet on. A held breath.
Stirring The cameras read the first motion. As bodies begin to dance, Sól shifts from red toward amber.
Fully awake A complete circle, moving together. Warm white light burning through the haze — the sphere is a small sun.
Fading When the dancing stops, Sól returns to sleep over thirty seconds. Ready for the next group to wake it.

"The ritual is the instruction manual. The instruction manual is the ritual."

— Lysergic doctrine · tenet 01

How it's built

Bamboo, fabric, addressable light

Sól's bare bamboo geodesic frame standing on the sand on site before skinning — hub connectors, central mast and work table with tools and cabling. — fig. 01 — bare frame on site · bamboo & hub connectors

Structure: 2 m geodesic · 42 bamboo struts, hand-cut and lashed · hub connectors · timber base on sand
Skin: Stretched fabric panels · addressable LED core on a central mast
Sensing: Two wide-angle infrared cameras → TouchDesigner motion field
Air: Two hazers beneath Sól, filling the light from below
Sound: Two subs · tribal electronic · opening-night only
Core: Audio-reactive LED — between rituals, Sól pulses with the DJ

The patch, live

Driving it from the sand

fig. 02 — TouchDesigner, running liveHet Landjuweel '26

No cue list, no operator. The TouchDesigner project ran fully autonomous all weekend — motion field in, colour and intensity out — tuned on the sand between sets while people were still dancing around it.

Everything visible on that screen is what the crowd behind it is doing: the audience is the input.

From the build

Raised on the sand, lit from the spine

The geodesic frame at night with the addressable LED core spine glowing green through the structure. — fig. 03 — first light · LED core spine

The bamboo geodesic frame assembled in a garden in daylight — a full sphere of struts and black hub connectors on a timber base, a stepladder alongside. — fig. 04 — frame assembly · bamboo & hub connectors

At the festival

Nobody explained it. That was the point.

fig. 05 — awakeningHet Landjuweel '26

Sól stood at the centre of the stage. The first dancers worked out the rule on their own — and then did something better: they recruited strangers to complete the circle. The ritual taught itself, group after group, all night.

Between awakenings the orb never went fully dark. The audio-reactive LED core locked onto the DJs, so Sól kept breathing with the music — a sun keeping time with the stage it anchored.

Built and raised with the kikvors crew. Thank you, Landjuweel.

Role

Concept, build & system — Jasper Veldkamp (Lysergic)

Venue

Het Landjuweel · Ruigoord · NL

Stack

Bamboo geodesic · TouchDesigner · addressable LED · wide-angle cameras

Status

Premiered July 2026 · with the kikvors crew

Jasper Veldkamp standing on the sand in front of Sól, silhouetted against the glowing geodesic orb at night. — fig. 06 — the builder, afterLandjuweel '26

How it started

The first drawing had a hand in it

The original proposal put the orb in the palm of a three-metre wooden hand rising out of a sandy crater. The hand never got built — time, weight, a festival deadline. The orb went up alone, and it turned out it didn't need the hand: a sphere on the sand reads as a sun rather than a prop, and the ritual around it works the same.

Pencil etching of the original Sól proposal — dancers in a circle holding hands around a giant hand holding the lit orb at dusk, an audience watching, a wind turbine on the horizon. — fig. 07 — original proposal study · unbuiltetching · 2026

Want a room like this?

Sól is one answer to one space. If you have a festival, a venue or a stranger idea, tell me the space and what you want people to feel inside it.

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