Linear Sky
Luftwerk
Permanent Installation
Concept:
This installation occupies the entry corridor into the 21c Hotel in Kansas City. Spanning roughly 40 feet, bars of light are placed facing the viewer. From the entrance of the corridor, the bars all appear to be the same size. As a viewer progresses down the corridor, however, they discover that it is a trick of perspective. At random intervals, the installation performs a subtle shift of color pallette, creating a simulated daylight cycle.
My Role
My responsiblities included providing consulatation on hardware selection and wiring architecture, as well as programming the installation. I repurposed an architectural controller already owned by the studio to control everything. We wanted behaviors that were beoynd the stock capabilities of the controller, so I wrote some custom scripts for image processing and fade animations. We built a full-scale test rig in the studio and spent several days viewing various options for animation characteristics and color pallettes. Once in Kansas City, I completed the electrical end of the installation.
Technical Design
This project runs on a Pharos Lighting Playback controller. Each LED bar has an architectural 16-bit DMX LED driver attached to it. Both the drivers and the LED products were selected for the quality of color rendering and smoothness of color fades.
The code for color sampling is written in LUA, and encapsulated by the controller's own environment which handles timing and DMX output.
Credits
Visual Design: Luftwerk
Technical Design: Andy Kauff
Photography: Mike Schwartz
Commissioned by: 21c Museum
Chief Curator: Alice Gray Stites
Challenges
From a design perspective, this installation doubled as the primary lighting source for the entry corridor. This placed some immediate practical needs that had to be worked into the character of this installation. In addition to the practical needs, the placement of this piece in a corridor informed other aspects of the animation and timing, as guests experience it in a linear way over a limited period of time.
Technically, the programming environment in the provided controller imposed some limitations that required some creative workarounds. Without the ability to load in modules, LUA has a fairly bare feature set. The software for the controller expects to call single scripts in isolation with limited access to the file system. I created a few tools in Python that allowed me to break the images into data that was more usable in this environment.
Images
