Design
Interview with Georges Berne/Lao Bei
8’18’’ * 8’18’’ is a new firm, founded in 2007 by the presidents of “Grandeur Nature” (François MIGEON) and “L’Observatoire 1” (Georges BERNE). The association of the two entities, of their shared competences of lighting engineer and lighting designer, promoves, with different signatures, the alliance between the technical rigor and the artistic emotion. It allows each one, from now on joint through 8’18’’, an amazing approach on subtantial projects, bringing them a both living, compared and experimented answer, 8’18’’ has a French touch in a World perspective. *Eight minutes 18 seconds is the time taken by a photon to travel the distance between the Sun and the Earth Georges Berne Born in Marseille in 1956, he combines technical scientific education with an artistic style. From 1980 to 1985 he worked for Philips. From 1986 to 1991 he worked as a professional Lighting Designer. In 1992 he established “L’Observatoire 1” followed in 1993 by “L'observatoire International”. During the two-year period 1994/95 he was vice-president of ELDA (European Lighting Designer Association). In 2007 he co-founded 8’18’’. In 2009 he was appointed “Chevalier in the Arts and Humanities Order”. Recent cultural works on which he was recently collaborating through “L’Observatoire 1” or 8’18’’ are: the Pompidou Art Center in Metz with Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, 2010; the Cité Internationale de la dentelle et de la mode in Calais with Alain Moatti and Henry Riviere, 2009; the Cham Museum in Da Nang with Renaud Piérard, 2008; the Modern Art Museum In Alger with Halim Faïdi, 2007; In progress: the European and Mediterranean Civilizations Museum in Marseille with Rudy Ricciotti; the Louvre-Islamic Arts Department in Paris with Rudy Ricciotti and Mario Bellini; the Louvre Abu Dabi with Jean Nouvel.
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What technical difficulties did you encounter? At this point we can talk about the lighting material. The first difficulty was convincing the supplier of the luminaires, in this case iGuzzini, that we needed more than a simple lighting system picked from the catalogue. We were looking for highly «professional» material, in the sense that access to the lamps for “relamping” had to be allowed without changing the way the spotlights were aimed, which meant locking the luminaires extremely «precisely»: each of the 60 structures supporting a total of 300 spotlights had to allow adjustments of around 1°... that is to say, adjusted one next to another like the pleats of a Fortuny pleated fabric. All of the spotlights are controlled using the DALI protocol, which wasn't designed for theatrical use. So the first and last difficulties were basically: adjustments, programming, management and long life.
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