bluebottle was engaged by local artist Natasha Johns-Messenger, curator Emily Cormack and MUMA to help bring Soft Time to life—an innovative light-based timepiece for Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). By supplying LED nodes and programming, we helped realise her vision for this unique sculpture.
Unveiled in 2024, Soft Time is a striking six-metre diameter light clock, now a significant addition to MUMA’s esteemed Public Art Collection, positioned at the heart of the campus.
The concept was to create a light sculpture that displays animations in sync with time. European Museum Tech (EMT) constructed the sculpture, assembling the bluebottle supplied Color Kinetics LED nodes into a circular formation and enclosing them in acrylic.
The animations are controlled by a Pharos VLC player, managing 1,696 nodes with a total of 5,088 individually controllable addresses. The artwork features two main components: a rotating color sequence that shifts every minute and an hourly animation synchronised to the controller’s real-time clock. Due to the complexity of the design, the hourly animation was created externally by Nick Lewis Design and imported as a video file.
To conserve energy and prolong its lifespan, the artwork dims by 70% at midnight and returns to full brightness at 5 a.m. each day.
