Parallel Perspectives
Luftwerk
Temporary Museum Piece
Concept
This installation consisted of a handful of individual works presented as a show at the Elmhurst Art Museum. The visual concepts played with the Mies van der Rohe building it was installed in.
My Role
This project had a few elements that required a customizable simple lighting sequence that would run infinitely. Each area stood by itself, and we were trying to minimize the amount of cable present, and the complication of the install. I built some cheap and simple lighting controllers off of an Arduino platform that was easy to program once on site, it accomplished slow 16-bit color fades. The low cost of this project allowed us to deploy one controller in each room (total of 3) instead of attempting to deploy a central controller, which would have left an unsightly cabling mess. I completed the install of the controller and lighting fixtures, and provided assistance in building the lightboxes.
Technical Details
Each lighting controller was built on an Arduino Uno with a DMX I/O shield. I wrote a routine that would regulate timing and generate DMX frames. The code is called as repeated fade commands, taking an RGB color and a fade time as arguments, allowing us to quickly and easily modify sequences.
The light boxes in this project use 16-bit DMX drivers with baked in interpolation. This provided very smooth color fades, which was essential for an installation so heavily focused on color.
Credits
Visual Design: Luftwerk
Technical Design: Andy Kauff
Photography: Peter Tsai
Hosted by: Elmhurst Art Museum
Images
