Dark Edge

At 3 a.m., the city falls into an energy-saving darkness.
Buildings extinguish their lights, leaving patches of shadow in the dim sky.
Along their edges, red warning lights blink—three or more points flashing in unison—signaling their presence and tracing their material boundaries in the dark.

Light, dark, light, dark.
Presence, absence, presence, absence.

This rhythm turns vast man-made structures into part of nature itself, breathing calmly in the night. Watching them flash in sync evokes a strange tranquility—a quiet trust born from regularity. When the lights appear, they delineate the edges of matter; when they vanish, the solid form dissolves into nothingness.
A thing without boundaries cannot be called an object. When a building loses its edge, the very concept of architecture collapses.

———

In the center of the plaza lies a black object—5 cm in height, 300 by 700 cm in area.
From the staircase above, it appears as a dark patch on the ground.
Only upon approaching does its true scale emerge: not a flat surface, but a raised rectangular volume.
Visually, it resembles a void sinking inward, yet in essence, it protrudes outward.

The thickness gives it mass, but also a function: to allow the LEDs at its four corners to cast light outward, beyond the shadow.
When viewed from the ground level, two of the lights disappear, concealed by the object’s body, leaving only a faint red reflection spreading across the floor.
The red light, emitted from the sides, glides parallel to the surface, while the main plane remains dark and opaque.
As the light appears, it sharpens the object’s edge; when it fades, the form retreats into the background, merging with the night.

(Note: The installation is significantly darker in person than in documentation.)