The Quest
Blending robotics, crystalline craftsmanship, and the poetry of light, The Quest transforms a physical space into a living choreography of illumination. It invites audiences to experience light not as a static medium but as a shifting, dynamic presence. A permanent kinetic light installation commissioned by Moët Hennessy, The Quest embodies the meeting point between precision engineering and ephemeral beauty.
Artist Statement
Kinetic light installations for us are often a search for ephemeral moments that invite the viewer to be fully present before the space shifts to refresh these sensations.
For The Quest, we drew inspiration from Hennessy’s meticulous craft, blending disparate eaux-de-vie into a unified taste despite ever-changing harvests. It is a deeply human tradition passed through generations, weaving together chemistry, nature, and the sensory art of taste.
Our attempt to translate this into light led us to create organic forms through caustics, a play of light and shadow that evokes natural fluidity. Each glass shard was hand-shaped to produce unique caustic patterns that envelop the viewer. Hidden among hundreds of these organic forms are a few “reverse engineered caustic” shards, designed in collaboration with Rayform. When light touches them, precise, blueprint-like images appear, breaking the illusion of randomness.
As the robotic arm moves through the crystalline landscape, its beam seeks, pauses, and lingers, as though searching for something just beyond reach. Each fleeting projection becomes a revelation that vanishes as quickly as it appears, a reminder that the most profound moments are often those that cannot be held.
Within The Quest, light passes through hundreds of meticulously crafted crystal shards embedded in a parametrically generated structure. Guided by a robotic arm programmed with near-human fluidity, the work performs a continuous, evolving choreography of illumination. As the beam interacts with each shard, it releases a unique pattern of caustics, those intricate envelopes formed where light bends and gathers.
Among them, ten highly engineered crystals contain within their depths the complex chemical compositions of Hennessy’s finest Eaux-de-vie, each one revealing a fleeting, intricate projection that unfurls across the surrounding walls before dissolving into darkness.
The arm’s movement and response system were conceived and trained to seek out these rare crystals, merging robotics, optics, and craftsmanship into one sensory, living system.
The Quest is a jigsaw puzzle of many parts, a collaboration bringing together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines for the first time. To design the laser-sharp caustic imagery, we worked with experts in reverse-engineered caustics and specialists in optics. Programmers, robotics experts and character animators gave the roving arm its persuasively lifelike movement. Architects and parametric designers followed a procedural approach to create a structure of suitable simplicity and elegance. The result is a unique artwork which blurs the lines between the artificial and the organic: an organism, made manifest through light, which lives inside a complex and precision-engineered environment.
Commissioned by Moët Hennessy, The Quest reflects the brand’s dedication to the art of refinement, transformation, and discovery. The collaboration was rooted in precision, innovation, and the search for essence – bringing together engineers, artists, and glass artisans in a singular creative dialogue that bridges technology and timeless craft.
In its perpetual motion, The Quest is a journey through light itself: the search for that which can never be fully grasped.
