Concept One

I had a lot of trouble narrowing down a concept for light art. When I first took this class, I was immediately inspired by images such as these:

I absolutely loved the vastness, immersiveness, and overall environment of the room; it felt like a different realm, a new way to view the world. I thought it would be wonderful to have a similar concept, except have the LEDs animated, so that it would look as though rain was slowly falling. Here’s a concept sketch I did:

The issue is that this is nearly impossible to implement with my current materials, and it doesn’t really integrate any new concepts. Daisy-chaining LEDs wouldn’t work, and individually hooking each LED up to an arduino would make the rain-strands thick and ugly, not subtle like I imagined. A possible saving grace would be “icicle” Christmas lights, which often have an animation like rain dripping already integrated; however, I feel like there would be no room for me to do my own programming/design.

Concept Two

My second concept is more abstract. It consists of thin, clear plastic or glass, held vertically, with LEDs of various colors held beneath, lighting up the plastic and glass.

I’m not really sure what it is meant to represent, but an image of a project like this came to me after looking at some other abstract artwork, such as the works of Jason Anderson:

Perhaps a mirror could be placed in front of the box to provide the reflection that J. Anderson’s art often implements.

Concept Three

The third concept is the one I am most confident in, because I know I can make it with my current materials, and I am decently hopeful that it will look pretty cool when complete.

The idea is to make an artistic/stylized rendering of a skeleton, within which I would add LED strips, to make it look as though the skeleton is glowing. I could even hide the batteries or Arduino controller inside the skeleton’s mouth. In the dark, it would hopefully cast light between the gaps in the bones, which I think would look really cool.

I was inspired by the artwork of argamaarts on Instagram, who decorates bones and skulls with crystals and bright paint.

Given time, I possibly could also add resin or glass “crystals” to the edges of the “bones” of my skeleton, which I could put LEDs under, so that the crystals would also glow.