The eLight prototype introduces the basics of concept, circuit, code and construction that are common to the projects that you will be engaged in throughout the New Media: Making Art Interactive course.
eLight is an invitation to explore the emotional and affective aspects of light and the relationship of touch and light. Framing the project in this way encourages each person to think about the role of sensory experience in interactive art and to probe our understanding of personal and collective responses to light.
A project prototype suggests that you will present eLight in a form that enables people to experience your concept of the emotional and affective aspects of light and the relationship of touch and light. A prototype successfully conveys the concept that you have in mind; it does not assume that everything will look exactly as you imagine it to be or constructed in its final form. Focus on the experience that is central to your project concept and present it in a form that enables people, other than you, to experience it.
In the process of developing your response to eLight you will explore how to:
- make a circuit that will light LEDs
- think of a switch [the opening and closing of the circuit] as an expressive medium
- add the arduino to this circuit
- use code to design the behavior of the light and interaction with touch
- investigate the relationship of light and touch
Use the arduino tutorials authored by Limor fried on the Adafruit site to get to know the arduino, the software that you will use to design behaviors, and the leds that are part of your getting started kit.
Refer to the: Intro • Starting • Lession #1, #2, and #3
Using this guide to the arduino and leds, create varied modes of illumination that help you to communicate your eLight concept using the expressive vocabulary of steady light, blinking light, fading light, colored light, etc.
Add to this a tangible dimension that conveys the affective or emotional experience of your concept of the eLight. Materials that transmit, block, reflect or diffuse light may help you to create the experience of light that you have in mind.
Keep it simple. Describe your concept clearly and as you are in the process of making the many decisions required to realize you concept, imagine the experience of the eLight and let this experience guide the choices that you make.
My prototype will explore using awkward movement to manipulate light and color. Conductive pads will be attached to the user’s elbows and knees. Certain connections between the conductive pads will fade certain colors in and out on an LED panel. For instance, if a user wants to create a purple color, he or she might have to maintain a certain tricky position.
I'd like to explore the idea of waiting with my sketch, by creating something that responds to the time of your interaction with it. I'm imagining an LED that is embedded in an object that you can pick up and hold, perhaps a paper mache ball or an ice globe. The LED lights when you pick up the globe, and turns off when you set it down, but it's not a simple on and off -- instead the LED fades out depending on how long you held the globe: a slow fade if the globe was held for a long time, a short fade, if the globe was held briefly. I may play with animating the light in some way while it's on -- making it pulse or flicker or change color in some way. I may also try the reverse -- having it turn off when you pick up the globe, and slowly turn back on.
This project will use rods of wind chimes that close a circuit when they touch/chime which triggers the Arduino to set off a LED display. Eventually, this will be set up in a sort of wind tunnel where the chimes and lights will be going off non-stop. When a person steps in front of the main fan, s/he will manipulate airflow through the tunnel. Another goal is to make many different chimes of different materials that will be more or less affected by wind and blockage and that will create varying tones.
Sara Nichol
My project is going to be based on connecting visual stimulation with physical movement. The woodshop exposed me to the technical way of making it happen, which I'm really excited for.
My prototype is going to be a wooden grid with multiple wires hanging down that wrap around reflective tinfoil balls. I'm going to try to set up multiple breadboards across the wooden grid so that the light can be spread around the person. Each of the balls with have a motion sensor on it that dims the light when activiated, and the audience members participate one by one and walk underneath the grid so that the multiple conductive balls are surrounding the person.
Lately I've been thinking about the idea the spectacle and how our relationship to the spectacle as an experience generally is set up so that we are overwhelmed by the presence of some kind or set of object(s) and where there are boundaries that separate the experience and that which experiences. This thinking has also coincided with my thinking about the creation and assignment of meaning to experience from a human perspective and how that mode of thought can be horribly depressing in that one can feel meaninglessness in all experience, or overwhelmingly inspirational in that one can feel as though they are the key to the infinite nature of experience. I am choosing to try and create a sense of the latter (because being depressing is no fun) by designing a small spectacle in the form of a light-show diorama that can only be experienced by inserting yourself into and completing a circuit that is the source of power for the light-show.
My project is all about its "awareness" of the audience's presence.
Imagine a 7'-tall x 3'-wide hallow wall - one face made of finished drywall, the other of a translucent material of the same color (wax paper maybe). Inside the wall are red lights. This wall is set up in the center of a gallery space, drywall-side facing the viewer as they enter the room. The ominous red light will illuminate through the back and fill the space behind this monolithic wall. As the viewer walks around to the back of the structure to find the source of light, a motion sensor will trigger, turning off the red lights before the viewer sees the source of light. As far as the viewer can tell, there was no source of red light. As they walk away, the red light slowly builds.
My biggest hurdle will be finding a translucent material for the back of the monolith that will look just like the opaque material on the front. Any materials suggestions?
-Sam Fuentes