LIGHT AS SKIN | 1997 – 2015
Supreme Particles was a new media art collective founded in 1992 in San Francisco and Berlin by Anna and Michael Saup. In 1997, they presented Light as Skin in the Lufthansa Passenger Tunnel at Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main Airport, one of the largest and longest-running interactive light installations in public space. Active until 2015, the work was experienced by over 78 million travelers. The tunnel architecture was conceived by Frog Design, California, founded by Hartmut Esslinger, who at the time was Michael Saup’s colleague at the HfG Karlsruhe.
Note: the title Light as Skin refers to using light as the skin of the tunnel, not to human skin or its color spectrum.
The project transformed a 270-meter tunnel at Frankfurt Airport into an immersive, interactive artwork. It divided the space into four sectors, each representing a cardinal direction, a continent, a state of matter, and a season. The installation used 2,000 dimmable neon tubes and a quadraphonic sound system to create a dynamic environment. The light patterns referenced DNA structure and elemental building blocks, while the color changes were influenced by the Earth’s movement throughout the year.
The work exemplifies a blend of technical media art structure with an underlying complexity, achieved through minimalistic design. The subtle interplay of light and sound invites viewers to engage with the system’s logic, revealing its depth through simplicity.
The installation Light as Skin functions as both a technical system and a conceptual experiment in universal communication. Its structure is deeply informed by Leibniz’s vision of a characteristica universalis—a symbolic language capable of encoding all knowledge and reasoning. Each light sequence, color change, and spatial pattern operates as a combinatorial unit, a visual “character” in a formalized language of experience.
The work also draws a direct conceptual link to Frank Drake’s interstellar Arecibo message, encoding fundamental elements of life—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus—through numeric and visual motifs. These pulses and sequences are not arbitrary: they are structured as layered codes, where binary-like progressions, elemental references, and periodic sequences converge to form a message both tangible and abstract. The tunnel becomes a medium for patterned dialogue, a transmission of order and structure not to external intelligence, but to innate human perception and awareness, fostering a heightened sensitivity to subtle patterns and rhythms. In this way, the installation serves as a conduit for reflection, presence, and the dissemination of Zen principles, embedding a contemplative dimension within the technical and combinatorial framework of the work.
Minimalism in Light as Skin is not absence, but precision. The simplicity of neon tubes and rhythmic light flows masks an intricate internal complexity, a dense lattice of combinatorial logic that parallels molecular structures, numeric systems, and cosmic patterns. The viewer encounters a system that is simultaneously readable as sensory experience and interpretable as a symbolic message, revealing layers of universal reasoning encoded in light, sound, and rhythm.
This frames the work as an ongoing exploration of communicating metastructure and the essence of life through media art, a living convergence of technical precision, minimalist aesthetics, and philosophical inquiry into how structured information can manifest the principles underlying existence.
In-Depth
The 270-meter tunnel linking Gates A and B in Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 1 is transformed by Supreme Particles into a continuous visual and auditory experience.
The installation is organized around fourfold correspondences, each of the tunnel’s four sectors representing:
- The cardinal directions: north, east, south, west
- The continents: Afro-Eurasia, America, Antarctica, Australia
- The states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma
- The seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter
These correspondences align with space, time, temperature, and extension, forming a layered framework where physical, temporal, and symbolic dimensions intersect. The tunnel functions as an experiential map, merging natural, human, and cosmic orders into a single immersive passage.
The light patterns trace the structure of DNA and the essential elements of life—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. Their colors shift with the Earth’s rotation and annual movement. The sequences map the elements’ atomic numbers onto the tunnel’s binary sector layout, inspired by Gottfried Leibniz’s De Arte Combinatoria and the 1974 Arecibo message.
The installation combines 2,000 dimmable neon tubes with a quadraphonic interactive soundtrack that blends field recordings, ambient drones, and kinetic motifs within each sector. This layered audio-visual design integrates planetary and spatial concepts into a passage experienced annually by over four million travelers.
An Elektrolux CD release, presented in a unique jewel case, preserves the ambient soundscape of the tunnel, offering a rare opportunity to experience the work beyond its physical setting.
Light as Skin extends beyond its role as a passage, offering a meditation on interconnectedness. By embedding spatial, temporal, elemental, and biological patterns into a space of transit, Supreme Particles turns brief moments into reflections on shared human existence. In an airport where thousands of people from every nationality, religion, belief, and social background converge, the tunnel highlights commonalities underlying human life, linking individual journeys to larger natural and universal rhythms.
Resources
- documentation
- Visitor Impressions
Fan CDs on YouTube
[氛围/新世纪/实地录音] Supreme Particles – Light as Skin (1999)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1G94y1s7fg/
