Tacoma, WA
032624
UPS DMS

Assignment 2: Light Installation
Near Misses
[LED, Cedar, Fabric] In collaboration with Alice Noble

Concept

This piece dives into the nuances of communication and collaboration. As a collaborative project, Alice and I had to navigate the pushes and pulls of interpersonal dynamics to further our progress. This piece hopes to reflect those moments of discord and harmony. Two sets lights are chasing after one another, hoping to reach the same page. When they do, finally, come to harmony, it is shortlived, and they diverge once again. This reflects human relationships - not always in perfect sync, but beautiful none the less.

Process

Near Misses consists 8 LED strips housed in a cubic wooden frame.  layer of fabric was sewn around the box, and starch stiffened fabric was used to create volume. Two lighting gel ‘patches’ were sewn into this inner layer, and a final layer of fabric was sewn over top. The piece is suspended by twine, and hardware wiring follows the twine to the ceiling before snaking to the control box. The LED strips were connected to a laptop via DMX box, and controlled by programming in the Processing 4 language. Brightness and the key color (top lights) of the lights fluctuates on a noise function, while the color of the following lights (bottom lights) maintains an integer distance on the color wheel away from the key light. To achieve the ‘near miss’ the following distance decreases and increases linearly to cause the colors of the two halves of the piece to converge. Each set of four LEDs varies within 20 degrees of the color wheel to achieve color depth within the section.