My name is Saul Woolf. I’m a 4th year working on a CS Major and an IMGD minor. I am fascinated by the use of light and shadow in art, as it adds a transmutable dynamic. This fascination has significantly steered my work so far and will probably continue to be the focus of my art throughout my life. I love how one is able to change the state of a light-oriented work to bring new meaning or perspective. The following are some of my prior art pieces.
Newton’s Seasons: I made “Newton’s Seasons” for my AR1101 midterm. In it, I have represented each season as a glass ball in a Newton’s Cradle, from left to right, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. The photos for Summer, Fall, and Winter, are all my own photos. The photo for Spring, on the other hand is a landscape I found online, into which I spliced a photo of my friend playing her guitar.
LED Matrix: This was one of my favorite projects to work on. This square-meter matrix consists of 900 individually programmable RGB LEDs in series with a Raspberry Pi controller. I programmed a library in python so I could script the LEDs as 30 by 30 ‘pixels’ allowing me to create some really cool patterns. The following video shows part of the process of creating the matrix. It includes some scripts I created for it.
Autonomous Piano Player: The goal of this project was fairly simple—I wanted to create a device that I could place on top of any standard-sized piano keyboard, and have it play any song. My partner and I spent about a month going from used-electronic store to used-electronic store, hoping to find an actuator to move across the keys. We hit the jackpot with 70 of these cheap, low-power solenoids. To play a song, one loads a MIDI file onto the SD card of the Arduino Uno, which in turn it communicates with two Arduino Megas specifying which solenoids to activate and how long to hold before deactivating it. I also connect a ‘volume’ control potentiometer to the Uno which controlled the force with which the solenoids would actuate, and buttons to pause, play, and restart the songs. We ended up showing the piano player at the Bay Area Maker Faire in California, (which was a blast).
More About Me:
When I was learning to program in high school, I kept finding that my pursuit of the arts was immensely helpful. As such, I made it my goal to try as many mediums of art as I could. In high school I was in quite a few productions, ranging from musicals like Fiddler on the Roof and Pirates of Penzance to plays like The Elephant Man and 39 Steps. I also took chorus, dance, and theatre classes.
The most influential class I had in high school was Applied Science Research, where we were inspired by our teacher to pursue our interests. In that class, I launched a weather balloon, built an 8000rpm motor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Esg9FqDFc) and an autonomous piano player (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=N2wma_7vAlM). I learned to take ideas from concepts to reality, and how to be self-sufficient in learning.