For my project I want to experiment with mirror and light projection. I actually thought of this idea the day after we had our first class and I am really set on it. My idea to create this is by using mirrors, lights, glass, and some sort of light blockage material (Cardboard, thick paper, etc). The image that I would like to create would be a beautiful, but at the same time powerful dragon. I am think of possibly adding flames to it and making a background environment may be really cool as well. It may prove to be very difficult to do but, I am very driving to make this piece happen. The pictures below represent my idea in a slightly different way. I couldn’t find anything that is exactly like it so I did my best trying to choose these images.
I was also inspired by Diet Wiegman. I may also decide to do a rotating light piece which is a little different from his shadows, but has the same concept. To do this I thought of many different ways. The first was making cutouts into the material and having them rotate.
The second was making a combined piece so when it rotates it transforms.
So those are my ideas. I am pretty much 100% confident that I want to do light/mirror projection, but I would really appreciate any/all feedback. Thank you!
Inspired by shadow art from Diet Wiegman, I decide to create an art piece based on sculpture and shadow. The project functions similarly as Wiegman’s which a strong light source is used to project shadow of the sculpture on a wall.
Wiegman’s shadow art all have very complex forms and that will be too much to achieve in this short period of time; therefore, the resulted shadow of this project will be relatively simple.
In Wiegman’s pieces, the original sculpture usually don’t have a particular meaning, and they are just random shapes. To make my project more interesting, I’ll try to give the sculpture some sort of shape or form, but maybe the reason why Wiegman didn’t do it is because it’s quiet difficult. The material I expect to use is some kind of clay.
shadow:
sculpture:
hope I can actually make something like this
or some Cthulhu monsters
Backup plan: if the first one does not work, I’ll just build a lamp out of LEDs. (yeah that’s it)
Right from the start, I intended for my project to utilize the tech of a Raspberry Pi. What better way than to make it connected to the Internet?
My first idea was a internet-connected flower. The flower would be able to open/close its petals, and wilt much like a regular flower would. Instead of having its roots feed on the nutrients of the soil, it would feed from weather feeds that it gets from the Internet. Its stem would be illuminated by a green LED strip and its filaments would either be fiber optic strands or a small array of LEDs pulsing various colors of light. Depending on what the weather would be on a particular day, the flower may close or open up. Its lights might be dimmer on a overcast day, and glow brightly on sunny days. The irony of this flower is that its display will be the best in a dimly lit room, despite the fact that many flowers thrive in bright sunlight.
On the flipside, I didn’t really have any particular message to go with this piece besides, “it looks cool”.
After last week’s light artist presentations, I got some inspiration for another idea. (winky-face at Veronica)
Janet Echelman’s web-like sculptures gave me an idea of creating something very similar where there is a web hanging from above. This piece would have several threads of LEDs strung together to form this web. Each colored LED would be indicative of a nearby smart device. The intensity of the light would be dependent on its signal strength. This is representative of how connected we are to the World Wide Web, and that we are just a small speck among it.
In the center would be a spider-like creature. Its eyes would emitting red light. The spider would be symbolic of the malware living on the Internet, preying upon unsecured devices. One that comes to mind is the recently unveiled Mirai botnet, where it was able to bring down a significant chunk of the Internet by leveraging upon unsecured smart devices. It would be an interactive piece by relying on the presence of people that use smart devices.
For the sake of the hardware being used and my lack of experience in hardware security, the piece will not connect to the Internet itself. Instead it will simply run some software (probably kismet + custom script) to scan and tell the Arduino to turn on a number of LEDs that match the number of devices found in the area.
After roaming through Adafruit to get a vague idea of how the heck I would electronically piece this together, I came across this:
Which I think would look cool if the LED arrays were rearranged and sewn into a web-like form. This tutorial will definitely be a useful resource when building the LED web.
As I thought more about the Internet of Things, I thought of a twitter account I follow named @internetofshit that sheds some humorous light on how serious the tech industry is when it comes to smart devices. For real though. Some of the things we see and use in our households really don’t need to have the Internet attached to it.
So like, I was trying to think of some of the properties of light that I think are the coolest, and from there I developed a couple of ideas, each of which is very different and shows off a different aspect of light.
Idea 1: Animated Portrait.
My first idea is based on the artist that Kelly showed off last class (Liu Dao). I thought that the concept of taking a static image and using LEDs to bring it to life. With this image I wanted to do something kind of surreal, so I was thinking of maybe doing something with Mother Nature and the elements. Another way I could take this, which could potentially be more interesting, is if I made the image of maybe Tesla or Edison trying to harness lightning into a small orb. Kind of going a little meta and making Light Art of the father of light.
Idea 2: Shadow Sculpture Sundial
So I was walking through Higgins Gardens and I was looking around and I saw a bunch of these nice like… kind of Doric columns. And my mind traveled down a rabbit hole there and after a while the thought that erupted was “Sundial”
This next idea is to take a sundial and turn it into a shadow sculpture. I want to make a weatherproof sculpture and put it on a pedestal so that over the course of the day the shadow evolves and changes over time.
I found a really cool example of something like this here:
Idea 3: Something with FadeCandy?
I don’t know. I always wanted to work with some cool Arduino stuff. So I was kind of thinking of maybe doing some sort of cool interactive piece with the FadeCandy. I don’t have much for this idea, but I don’t want to rule out this opportunity.
Piece will be an interactive structure. It will be made of some translucent/transparent material such that light can be produced and seen from within it. These lights may or may not already be randomly changing colors (undecided as of this post). The color and intensity of lights will change in response to the pressure put on the different parts of the structure. So the main idea will be the viewer places objects on the structure (or rearranges current ones on it) and this will change the piece. It may also be possible to interchange parts of the structure itself (undecided as of this post). A very basic idea of what the structure could look like can be seen below:
The leftmost structure shows what it would look like with no objects placed on it. The second (middle) structure shows on object placed on one of its parts, changing the color of that part (undecided if this will influence other parts of the structure). The rightmost structure shows how one could change the position of one of the structure’s parts.
Ideally this piece will already look interesting and colorful on its own and be an enjoyable piece to view. The main goal/idea however is that the viewer will improve his or her own experience by customizing the piece in the viewer’s own image. And if this piece were to be public, it could tell the current viewer a little about the past viewer(s) based on how the structure was changed and the objects that have been placed or rearranged on it.
I have ideas of concepts and techniques I would like to experiment with, but no specific vision in mind yet. My first idea is to cut open lots of glow sticks using a utility knife to collect the vials of fluorescent dye inside. (Hopefully without breaking them, but I could use glowsticks that have already been cracked also.) The dye in glowsticks shines when mixed with hydrogen peroxide, a common household chemical. Once I have the dye, I could try using sponges or paintbrushes to create glowing images.
Unlike many of my classmates, most of my degree is not strictly related to computers – that’s more of a hobby. Since I am a Chemical Engineering major, I think it would be interesting to use chemical light instead of electrical light. Also, I have always wanted to cut open a glowstick.
It would also be interesting to see what it looked like to layer the glowing dye over the top of a regular painting to highlight certain areas. Not only does that have the potential to look really cool, it is also a useful way to use the fact that people’s eyes are attracted to light to direct (or misdirect) people’s attention to the subject of the image. I even have some subject ideas in mind – it would be a great way to portray luminescence in fish or ocean waves (some water appears to glow when it impacts something because it is filled with bioluminescent plankton.)
Alternatively, since radioactivity is frequently portrayed as ‘glowing’, I could do something about a nuclear subject. It also might be interesting to hide a message in the lit-up windows of a basic cityscape that, depending on what glow in the dark pigment I use, is either only visible temporarily until the reaction stops, or is only visible in the dark.
The other concept I have is to play with the effect of liquid on visible light (and vice versa). Inspired but Professor Rosenstock’s immortal quote, “What would this look like if we stuck an LED in it?” and my own love of rainy days, my idea is to use the halos and reflections created by water to create interesting patterns of reflected light.
This looks pretty satisfying if we stick an LED in it.
I’m not sure yet whether I want to use a dynamic liquid and a static light or dynamic lights and a static liquid. Dynamic liquids are harder to manage, but it might be interesting to see the kind of light patterns that would be created by an internally lit column of liquids of different densities. Sort of like sticking an LED into a bottle of salad dressing, but we can do better with the colours than salad dressing. For the static liquid and dynamic lights, I could create the style of reflections that appear when lights shine on a smooth body of water or wet pavement, and make patterns of colour that change over time.
I decided to go with a theme of opposite attract such as Fire and Ice for my project. Being an architectural engineering major I wanted to create a lighting fixture with this project. I have come up with two different ideas, one being a pendant and the second being a tall modern art floor fixture.
Idea 1:
For this idea I took the first thing that came into my mind when I thought fire which was flames burning something. I pictured fire burning on a block of ice and the ice melting.
The fire would be made of felt looking similar to the picture below and beneath the flame there would be optical fibers hanging with glass or light pieces at the bottom to represent the water running down.
A sketch is shown here..
Idea 2:
This fixture would be larger and stand on the floor. It would be created with curved random wood/logged spiraling upward. The wood would be thin enough that you could see the light source creating a glowing effect through. But within the wood facing upwards there would be holes so the light could shine through onto the walls or ceiling. At the top of the wood would be a ice cube balancing on the tip and it would have its own light source. This would be created of glass blocks with an iceburg pattern and would be the main illuminance feature.
At the moment, I’m struggling between several ideas, debating feasibility, logistics, and overall end product.
The first is more about a design/simulation. I’d like to design the lighting show for a music performance, focusing on a single song or two. There are softwares that exist for this task, and I believe the final product would be a 3d rendering of the show.
A screenshot of such a software
The second involves adding lighting elements to something in my apartment. I might try running lights throughout my bedroom to create the TRON-esque atmosphere and then program the lights to a set pattern alongside music or to react to music.
The follow up to this would be to add lighting on one or more of my guitars. This would fit better than an entire room if I were to have the same programming intentions
Along the lines of this, but a lil’ less awesome
My third idea involves clear plastic/acrylic sheets. It’s very simple to light these from the side with LEDs and I could try different shapes to create a 2D image. I can also play around with different color plastic and different color LEDs for various effects.
Maybe a combination of these and Steven Knapp’s work
My project idea is inspired primarily from a project I found by Scott Lawson, where he outlines all the steps needed to make a simple LED strip that lights up in response to audio input. He also has a demo of the working product:
I’d like to at least partially emulate his project, although I’d like to modify the physical construction of the LEDs a bit. One idea I had was to change the layout of the LEDs to some two-dimensional shape:
The idea here is that each ring expanding outwards could be mapped to a specific band of the quality I’m trying to visualize. For example, the inner rings could represent higher frequencies or higher energies and the outer rings lower values.
Besides the shape I might also want to modify the look of the individual LEDs. I could leave them bare, which allows for the light generated to be more direct and impactful. I could also cover them in some kind of translucent enclosure, allowing neighboring LEDs to blend together and create an overall smoother image.
An alternative to the concentric rings of LEDs is to have a simple LED grid that displays any kind of image. If I did this, I would probably display something like what Micah Scott did for her Mixcandy project. She used an LED grid to show a simulated particle system that reacted to the music. This is a much less direct way of showing qualities of the music, but certainly just as interesting.
I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of music visualizers because they try to take something like music, which is so ephemeral and hard to describe in other ways, and convert it into another form like images or light. I think using LEDs is a good approach to this problem of trying to describe music with light, because they can exhibit some similar qualities to music. I think it will be an interesting challenge trying to map qualities of music like energy, rhythm, tone, and mood to qualities of light like hue, brightness, and rate of change. Ultimately, I hope my project captures the feelings evoked by music in my visualization.
For this project, I really want to either create a story or environment. I also want to stick to simple techniques for the piece and not get really involved with the technology aspect and focus on the art and story. I really like working with shadow and contrast between light and dark.
My first idea that I can do for the project involves one of the examples we were shown on the first day of class. It involves creating an environment from a single shade covering a light. I really like this because it can change any place into a whole new area. It can make it creepy, beautiful, whimsical or anything else. It can evoke feelings and thoughts by putting someone in the area that is being created from the object. The materials for this could be lamp shades, plastics, materials that could give it texture and depth.
The second idea is something that I thought of because I love carving pumpkins. I thought of the idea of carving scenes into objects that wouldn’t be carved or even gutted. One object made me think of this originally was an old TV. It could be gutted out and then a scene could be carved into it using pinhole poking or a powered carver. I really like the idea of using the objects and scenes carved into it to make a statement or show a contradiction. For example, this could be like a TV with scenes of nature on it to show how people spend too much time watching TV and not outside.
The third idea is from artists that were shown during the artist presentations. I really liked the idea of creating shadows from objects that you would have never known created that shadow. I would use this technique in a similar way to my second idea. I like the idea of showing one thing with the objects and then showing something different with the shadow. One idea I had with this was to show a story about people meeting and the journey of falling in love by showing objected involved in their lives but showing more in the shadow. I like to tell stories and do things that people can relate to so I could do this through the sculptures. This project would have to be done in a room but then only documented in pictures, so it is not very movable or permanent.
