Entry Room · Ambient

Chromatic Drift

Two hundred and twenty independently addressable fixtures move a single field of colour across a curved 30-metre ceiling, timed to a generative score that never repeats the same way twice.

12–15Minutes

40Capacity

220Fixtures

01of four rooms

The idea

A slow tide of colour that has no beginning and no edge.

Chromatic Drift began as a question Wren Castellano kept returning to after a decade of building shows built on cuts and drops: what does light do when nobody is asking it to mean anything? No blackouts, no reveals, no drop-the-beat moments — just colour, moving the way weather moves, indifferent to whether anyone is watching.

In the room

Guests enter under a 30-metre coved ceiling gridded with 220 individually addressable fixtures. A generative engine called Fieldkit — built in-house on Rust and OSC — steers the whole ceiling as one continuous gradient, never repeating a state twice in a single day of shows. There is no correct spot to stand; the room is built to be walked through slowly, in either direction, for as long as guests want to stay.

Composer Idris Okafor scored the room in five overlapping ambient beds tuned a quarter-step apart, so that as guests move through the space the harmony itself seems to drift with the colour overhead. Chromatic Drift is the one room in Pulse built entirely without interaction, on purpose.

— The score, on Chromatic Drift

Technical credits