D18 LIGHT ART

My Dragon is now entirely working, I have all of the LED’s in place and able to be turned on by the power source. This week I will look to put the Dragon in the fuller sub basement so that I can continue to polish it and set it up for Thursday.

 

So far everything is going well! This past weekend I finished folding all 780 origami balloons and started to string them on the LEDs. So far I have about 10 strings done but I’m not hanging them all until I string all of them. Even though I made the balls back to back on the string, some are different sizes and some strands hang lower. So after I finish stringing them together, (hopefully by this weekend) I have to work on making sure they all line up and are the same length. I will do this by twisting the wire in between some of the balls.

Here is was it looks like so far with 6 strung up. You can start to see the curve of the ocean wave at the top! Again I just have to fix the bottom so they are all aligned up.

Hey Guys! Here are some Florescent Images I took!

I have decided to grow this arrangement of bacteria over a couple of days, taking a picture of the growth every day. These will be added in a series to create a GIF showcasing the growth of my art project.

I will also create another series using multiple agar plates to create a larger image, and create a GIF of that too.

In addition to that, I will be bringing the class to the lab to see the end result of both works of bacteria.

Tune in next week to see the results!

 

Okay so this week went pretty well. Started off by dealing with my light issues.

I wanted to contain the string lights I had so I put them in this plastic bottle.

Then I needed to find a way to defuse them so I wrapped a piece of paper around the bottle and I think it worked pretty well.

I set up a bunch of climbing supplies and arranged them in a way that made a pretty cool shadow. I wanted to combine my idea of creating a separate box world, and doing something with shadows as a part of the piece. I think one of my initial problems was I was focusing a lot on the art aspect and not as much on the light aspect, so I wanted to bring things back to the light.

This is another angle on the shadow I created, I especially liked the red cast my water bottle made on the canvas.

It’s hard to see in this picture, but I lightly traced the shadow in pencil on the canvas.

Then I took the backdrop canvas away and traced it out in black pen.

I started adding different elements of an imaginative world, including a pet snake tied to a tree that is trying to escape down a hole to an underwater world where a friendly octopus and jellyfish live.

So I put the canvas back at the set up and was having some trouble lining up the shadows again, but I think I got the basics. Some of the drawing was covered up by the shadow in a weird way, but I think I can fix it in the final iteration.  I have added more details to the canvas since then, but  was having trouble getting the pictures to transfer from my phone.  Once I get the background artistic features set, I’ll enclose it further to create more of a separate space.

This week I worked to finalize all of the technical aspects of my music visualizer. My original plan was to use an audio jack to input music to the Arduino. After implementing the circuitry and trying to write the software I couldn’t figure out how to process the signal at the analog input of the Arduino. With more time and some more research I could have eventually figured it out, but wanted to take a safer approach to guarantee I had a working project. Instead of input from an audio jack, I decided to use an input from my computer.

With audio coming from the computer, the computer can be used to process the audio before sending it to the Arduino. I did this using the program Processing and some open source code. The hardest part about this was that the minim  library for Processing takes in whatever the default recording device is on the computer as its audio input line. Windows computer used to have something called stereo mix, but it has been removed with Windows 10. It took me a while to figure out a fix for this, but eventually found a program that acts as a virtual aux cord and connects the computer’s output device (the speakers) to the computer’s audio input. With this program I was able to use the processing software and implement a functioning music visualizer with a strip of LEDs. The working technical part can be seen in the video below.

The next step for the upcoming week is just building a finished design. For this design, I want to build a sculpture that looks like an audio signal and can be hung on a wall. A sketch of the design can be seen below.

Charlie Brooks

This week, I made substantial progress fleshing out the logistics of my project. The major milestones that I reached included deciding what image I will create with my light painting, how I will shape my acrylic pieces, where I will install my piece, the scale of the finished work, and sourcing all of my materials.

I decided to create an ocean/beach scene with my light painting. The finished image will (hopefully) have a sandy beach in the forefront with a single palm tree, a sun setting over an ocean in the middle ground, and a red-yellow sky over the water.

I received all of my acrylic samples at the end of last week. I have 6 4″x4″ colored acrylic pieces, and 6 5.5″x3.75″ colored pieces. These should be enough to create my finished work, as I currently plan to use less than half of the total acrylic I have.

To shape my acrylic, I had intended to use a scoring tool to precisely break and shape the sheets. This tool doesn’t work as I hoped, as it takes 10-15 passes and a lot of pressure to make a single break. Instead, I am going to laser cut my samples into precise shapes. This method will allow me to make more curved edges, which should create a better final image. Also, I can cut the holes for the fishing line at the same time, saving prep time. I have all of the shapes created and ready for laser cutting, and I have time on the Laser Cutter scheduled for 4pm today (4/19).

The final scale of my image will be ~ 4″ x 4″, with the shapes distributed over 4-6″ of depth. With a light source positioned behind, this size should create a large image projected onto a wall 8-10′ away.

Finally, I solidified where I will be installing my work. After last week’s class, Prof. Rosenstock showed me the room in Fuller’s basement and I found a small corner to install my work. It should work well for what I need to do.

The only things that I have left to do in this final week are pick a light source and a base for my work, and then assemble the final image. I believe that a strong flashlight will be sufficient, and I plan to use a plastic stand with a grid of holes drilled in the top to secure my hanging acrylic pieces. This should give me an easy way to quickly secure the shapes, as I intend to use small binder clips to attach the fishing line. I will tape/secure the stand to the floor, and precisely locate the light source. I believe that it will take 5-10 hours of assembly once I have all of my acrylic cut, which I can spread over the coming week to get as crisp of a final image as I can.

The past two weeks have been multiple failures and iterations of this project for me. My first failure was that I didn’t post the post for last week.

Last week I had two failures that set me back. The first one was that the broken gems did not have the same effect as the whole ones when shining light through them. This left me to find another thing to shine light through to get the effect I wanted. After searching online for a while, I was able to find smaller plastic gems that I could use. (The search term that got me to the product I needed was “wedding confetti” and I have no idea why.) My second failure of last week was with the shipment of the small gems as it got sent back the first time and did not get here until last Wednesday, making it hard to have a set up ready in time.

This week I made changes based on feedback. I made a test stand for the dish to be placed on so the light can shine up through it and sorted through all the gems to get different color mixes to play around with the mood they set. (I learned that it needs to be dark out to take pictures in my room cause there is too much light during the day.)

Temp stand with light

All dark pink gems

 

Various color mixes

I had a major failure this week that taught me to check the shipping location when ordering from amazon as the new light and bigger gems that I ordered shipped to my house instead of the school. I luckily will be able to get them this weekend but it does set my plan back a bit.

The next step I plan to do is create a stand that sets the dish at an angle so the gems move when rotated. I have not decided if it will shine the light up through the gems or down and off of a mirror.

If I have time, I would like to play around with having  patterns over the light coming from the gems to see what effects it creates.

This week, I finished up most of the part of the projects. First thing I did was soldering the LED and making them into the shape that I want them to be. Because I bought LED separately without any prebuilt wires, therefore I can make wire them to shape that I like depend on how much space I have for the inner and outer glass layer. Below are pictures I took after I finish soldering like 40 LED. It took a while at the beginning, like 2 hours for the first 8 LED but then I think I become professional at soldering these types of solder so the rest of LEDs did not take too much time.

At first I decided to solder 8 LED at a time to form a square side, however, when I put them into the cube, the more wire it has the less space I have, therefore I decided to solder them together to make a bigger string of LED.

Next Step is I cut the one-way mirror film and add them to the acrylic structure I made in previous week, instead of just use tape, I learn that adding soap into both surface help glue them together.

Then I decided to play around with the color display, I add a few light sequence to display the LED and put them into the cube.

A few cool thing that I realize with the infinite mirror is that if I have 2 LED, and instead of making the inner mirror parallel with the outer one, if I put it in an angle, then it would produce some unexpected curve performed by the 2 LEDs instead of just straight lines.

Last week I also testing ways to draw or sculpt the acrylic to see if it has any cool effect. Next week, I would add more artistic detail into the cube, and hopefully will make the cube more interesting.

My project is to make a rotating light painting with with a robot arm, and every thing works. This week I had the arm draw a low poly bunny again in auto mode after getting permission from professor Putnam. The video below is the robot moving in real-time in auto mode on low speed.

After drawing the pattern again in auto mode I tested illuminating the background of the shop and ran the program at different speeds to see how the increased light level would affect the brightness of the background and the light streaks.

After experimenting with the program speed I decided to run at 50% speed for the rest of the light paintings so the environment would be visible, but not compete with the light streaks for attention. Next, I tested the rotation aspect of the project by stitching together and stabilizing a series of long exposures while re-positioning the camera in an arc sequentially. This was done to verify that this method for creating a video, used before on the regular photos, still worked for light paintings. The same rendering process worked and the result can be seen below.

After verifying that the technique for combining images into a stabilized video still worked I expanded the experiment into the full art piece.  After 6 hours of taking long exposure photos every 77 seconds the final light painting rotation is shown in the video below.

The final piece is able to make use of the 3D drawing motion of the arm by showing the series of long exposure photos of the exact same motion produced by the robot arm. However there is room for improvement, the program could be reworked to remove the flicker at the start of the path by having a brief overlap, the process of the generating the program could be automated, and the the tripod movement could by automated. Overall I am happy with the progress on this project.

It’s been a weird week. I feel like I haven’t made as much progress as I should have, and ran into a few snags that I was not expecting (but most of which are easy fixes). I have everything put together and built as you can see below, but I haven’t had a chance to spray the pipe black due to weather.

This weekend should be warming up, so that’s a quick fix. I’ve also put together a wire lattice on the top frame from which I can drape the lights and have them rise and fall from different positions on a grid. I tried out a few different objects in the scene, I’m favoring a pair of shoes at odd positions and angles and trying to work with how they interact with the lights.

There is one last issue that is going to be rather difficult to deal with and I can’t actually resolve until the very end: setting up my piece. The frame and the base are not connected, but the lights will be attached to both. This creates a problem where I can’t really move the thing once everything is set and fixed to the base/frame, so I can’t get to the point where I can say it’s finished until I can bring it into the art studio. I’m working out exactly where I want my lights, and will be drafting a blueprint for it this weekend, but I need to know when we have access to the room we will be showing the projects off in so I can get set up as soon as possible.