I am still trying to decide which concept I would like to pursue for the rest of the term, but I have narrowed it down to two different potential projects.
Concept 1: As I mentioned in my introduction post, both traveling and my sister are major inspirations for me. Coincidentally, my sister just travelled to Turkey from England on a trip and was able to go up in a hot air balloon while there. She sent me some pictures and a video of her experience and not only was I envious of her, but I was also inspired! My idea for my project is to create a scene with hot air balloons in the dark sky, using some source of light as the “fire” that allows them to float in the air. The balloons could be made of different colored tissue paper or some other material that could be easily formed into a balloon and light would shine through. A shadow box could be used to hold the balloons and lights. I think it would be interesting if the lights could flicker a little when turned on to imitate the flickering of the fire. I also think some could be dimmer than others. The lights would be controlled by a switch and would remain on when flipped.
Concept 2: I thought I could incorporate some of my major into the project. My second idea is to draw an anatomically accurate heart and use lights to represent the blood flowing through the veins and arteries when the heart beats. Normally veins are depicted as blue and arteries red, and the blood flows in a particular direction at a particular rate. I was thinking the lights could light in the same way blood would flow. Perhaps the input would be data from an ECG and each beat would trigger the lights to turn on sequentially so it looks like the blood is moving through the veins.
Artist Question(s): I’m still trying to decide between these two concepts, which do you think is more interesting? For the heart concept, do you have any ideas for how to “pump” the lights?
I think that the heartbeat is very interesting, but i really like the hot hair balloon idea, I think it would look really pretty to have them lit up and be in front of a pretty scenery
I think it could be very cool if you could cast a see through heat with resin or gelatin (what ballistic gel is made of). That way you could have it be 3D and put the lights inside of it.
I think finding a way to represent and base your project off of hot air balloons would be so cool! I also love them and would be interested to see how you were able to portray that effect.
I agree that the hot air balloons idea would look very nice, especially with the flickering inside. However, if you do go with the beating heart I think the best way mimic the beating would be a heavily diffused string of individually addressable LEDs.
I know youve mentioned you dont have much experience with using electronics but I definitely think it would be really cool if you were able to recreate the beating heart as it also has a personal connection with your major and career path. There are a bunch of options out there to achieve a sequenced flow of lights with minimal/zero programming options. In my opinion, going with LED strips that can connect to your phone is likely the easiest option as you can ‘program’ the lights to be any color and animation from an app (shouldnt be too hard to figure out with a few google searches)
You can definitely use an Arduino and heartbeat sensor to gather information from the user’s heart beat. There’s already code online that translated the data into an integer range that’s very easy to use. You can then have LEDS that light up in sequence. I think there are LED strips that can do a running sequence that you can purchase as well. I’m not sure if you can change the rate of the sequence but that might make for a smoother visual effect.
I like the heart idea and I think you could get a great pumping effect using LED strips and cycling through the lights in a sequence.