SOLSTICE by Iregular
@Iregular, photo credit: Lawrence Elizabeth Knox, 2022
Case study conducted by :
Discussion held with Daniel Iregui, founder and creator of Iregular.
CHALLENGE : Transform a project that spent three years as a PDF file into a 250-foot interactive piece that comes to life by virtue of its audience’s participation and collaboration.
COMPANY : Iregular is a digital art studio founded in Montréal in 2010 that creates audiovisual installations, large-scale sculptures, architectural projections, and set and stage design, with a focus on interactive and immersive experiences.
SOLUTION : Not giving up on SOLSTICE’s concept and finding a co-producer willing to push the limits of typical digital art consisting of projections and screens.
CASE : SOLSTICE is a monumental interactive installation that invites the audience to take control of its immediate environment.
In 2019, Iregular – with its project, SOLSTICE – was one of the four finalists in the Luminothérapie competition for original winter-themed interactive experiences to be installed in Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles.
“When you become a finalist,” explains Iregular’s founder Daniel Iregui, “they give you a budget to elaborate the piece, and by elaborate, I mean design to the screw. So, we designed it as a ready-to-build piece.”
“Unfortunately, we didn’t win,” he adds. “So, SOLSTICE was a piece that existed only as a PDF for three years.”
Despite this setback, Iregular did not give up on SOLSTICE. “We believed in SOLSTICE, and we were trying to make it work.” When Discovery Green, a private park in Houston, Texas, that curates a lot of interactive work, was looking for an installation to celebrate its 15th anniversary, Iregular was invited to present SOLSTICE, thanks to the Weingarten Art Group, an art advisory firm that selects artworks for its clients.
That did not stop Daniel and his team. Neither did the fact that SOLSTICE was to be presented on what Daniel calls a deconstructed screen, “custom-made frames of light that are sort of exploded and placed in a public space, an entirely different beast from what the firm normally works with.
“Ninety percent of Iregular’s pieces are designed to be a projection or presented on a LED screen,” says Daniel “We’re really good at software. We’ve developed really good expertise in software production and deployment. Our work essentially takes the form of software presented on screens.”
Making SOLSTICE a reality
Iregular entered into a partnership with Jack World, a firm that specializes in designing and building interactive works for public spaces. “Basically, they’re amazing fabricators and we connected really well from the beginning.”
The two studios became co-producers and embarked on a mission of sorts to make SOLSTICE a reality. They invested the fee Discovery Green offered for presenting the piece (which was close to a quarter of the budget) and tackled together the many challenges they were faced with.
“Debugging physical artworks is very different from debugging virtual artworks. When you debug software, you change it, you’re in control. Maybe it’s difficult, but you just do it. With a physical object, it’s very different. You need to go to it, move it, and source the materials. The prices will fluctuate, and we were entering the COVID economy era… one day steel was at one price, the next day at another.”
Daniel Iregui
SOLSTICE – the experience
SOLSTICE embodies Iregular’s ethos of combining interaction and audience experience to reflect and transmit concepts and meanings. Designed to disturb the perception of your surroundings, SOLSTICE makes you lose sense of where you actually are, somewhere between reflections, parallel dimensions and reality. A stretch of doorway-sized frames lead to a central luminous rotating fixture: the sun. Large mirrors facing each other are placed parallel to the frames, extending the space with infinite reflections. All frames and mirrors glow thanks to controllable lights, and each frame also has built-in speakers, playing an accompanying reactive soundscape1.
As its creator explains it, SOLSTICE is a unique experience, and people reacted to it in unexpected ways. “Basically”, he says, “the whole concept is that we really wanted to create a space within a space, something that is in a public space and that you suddenly enter. You feel you’re entering because of a sound and a light; you’re immersed in sound.
“So, we created this space but didn’t foresee that people would actually stay. We thought it was going to be a space that you just go through. But somehow the combination of light and sound, and, I guess, the installation-design features made people stay for a long time.
“So, SOLSTICE, rather than being a structure that you go through, became a space that people stay in, explore, and live through the whole experience.”
Daniel Iregui
Going international: targeting every public space in the world
When he founded Iregular some 13 years ago, Daniel’s objective was mainly to have a studio where he could create artworks that he’d be able to show to the largest audience possible. And he wanted these pieces to be interactive: “I’m a programmer, I’m a musician, I’m a graphic designer, so interactive installations allowed me to combine all of these interests”, he says.
“Going international”, he adds, “was just because I wanted to make sure that the pieces that we create are seen by as many people as possible. Everything we do very regularly is interactive. Without interaction, for us, it’s dead. It’s an instrument that nobody plays.
“Our work has to be interacted with. That’s why we display them in public spaces all over the world, because that’s where the public is.”
This endeavour seems to be bearing fruit with Iregular’s work having been shown in 25 countries around the world, including the Netherlands, Mexico, Switzerland, France, Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and the USA.
SOLSTICE is still in its infancy. After Houston and Chicago in 2022 and 2023, it will be installed in the Quartier des spectacles in Montréal from November 30, 2023 to March 10, 2024.
It’s available for touring in Canada and the United States, but not elsewhere for now because it’s a very big piece, expensive to ship both in terms of money and carbon footprint. Daniel does not rule out the possibility of taking it to Europe and leaving it there. “What we want to avoid is just jumping from continent to continent on every exhibition.”
The original investment has not been recouped yet, but the projections are optimistic: SOLSTICE should be profitable after its fifth exhibition, so it’s two exhibitions shy of turning a profit.
What contributes to the studio’s successes? “Since we’ve started creating projects,” says Daniel, “we’ve been looking at what is common around the world, so we can create one project in Montréal and present it all over the planet. What you need to do is try to find that essence.”
That essence may be the secret ingredient. Combine it with Iregular Studio’s ethos – “participants’ reactions influence the art work just as much as the art work influences them. It is only its relationship with people that gives it meaning” – and you’ve got a winning formula.
1Source: Iregular Unveils Monumental Interactive Public Art Installation, SOLSTICE.