"Mountain of Gold" by The Latest Artists (photo by Ming Wu)

Background

Chinatown Remixed is an annual, art festival in Ottawa’s Chinatown district.  For one month each spring, the merchants and restaurants of Chinatown welcome artists’ exhibitions and performances.

Having exhibited lighting installations back in the 2010 and 2009 festivals, Deb and I wanted to try something different from, and more spontaneous than our usual “plan and execute” lighting approach.

After a conversation with one of the primary organizers, Don Kwan of Shanghai Resto, we did indeed come up with something different for the 2011 edition (May 15 – June 15).

Read on for all the details . . .

Project

Speaking w/ Don about the festival, the neighborhood, and the community that lives there, we learned about the gold mountain, and decided to do a performance art piece called Mountain of Gold, creating a mountain of golden garbage, with the idea that such a mountain would be attractive from afar, but not as expected up close.

Here’s the official artist statement that accompanied the piece:

The idea that North America offers a “Mountain of Gold” is an ideology held by many Chinese immigrants.

These newcomers believe that their adopted homeland will offer a vast array of exciting potential and opportunities.

Sadly, for many, this idealized Mountain of Gold, ends up lackluster — gleaning instead with unfulfilled promises and dreams.

To symbolize this metaphorical mountain, The Latest Artists offer a performance piece in which a mountain of golden garbage was generated into a large, heaping pile over the course of the Chinatown Remixed opening day festivities.

Shredded bills, symbolic of lost and wasted money, contributed to the large garbage pile.

The piece also intends to elicit questions about the wastefulness of art and general societal resources.

We were situated perfectly in an alleyway, which we promptly tarped before starting work on the foot of our mountain.

Over the course the afternoon, our mountain steadily grew with the help of enthused passers-by:

Until we had a beautiful mountain of gold (and ran out of garbage to add):

Reactions

Personally, I’d expected the gold spray paint to run off the garbage bags, creating a gross, streaming, golden mess, but instead the paint stuck wonderfully to the clear garbage bags, and the golden heap ended up becoming a highly aesthetic object.  It also really jumped out from a afar, playing perfectly into the golden mountain premis:

I’d also expected the general public to be disgusted by the spectacle, calling attention to the material waste and pollution generated by painting a garbage heap with golden spray paint.

Instead, people were eager to jump in and help paint the trash bags and shred bills.  Photographers aplenty were attracted to our glimmering garbage pile, and it made for a great photo op of the day:

The bling factor even attracted China Doll for a photo shoot:

Peter Simpson of the Ottawa Citizen lamented the fact that our mountain only stood for an afternoon before it was dismantled and pushed to the curb (only a few metres away). [ UPDATE: Peter praises  Mountain of Gold here. ]

Who would have guessed that a pile of pretty golden garbage would be so enjoyable?  Well, given the current state of pop culture, perhaps it’s not that surprising after all

Intro

Urbana is an annual fundraiser hosted by Dharma Developments where proceeds raised support community programs with the goal of preventing homelessness in Ottawa. This year, URBANA is helping Action Housing / Action-Logement, an Ottawa-based charitable organization that assists low-income individuals and families to find and maintain safe, affordable and adequate rental housing.

Each annual Urbana hosts an artistic feature from local artists.  This year, Dharma contacted Deb and I for an interactive lighting installation by The Latest Artists.  The theme of “an on-going light for housing rights” was developed by integrating our medium of light with the need for the awareness of housing (and other social/charitable) issues to remain front and center: these issues don’t simply get solved with single instances of involvement or donation, but require constant attention to address.

This theme lead to the proposed installation: a large lighting structure, architecturally-inspired, requiring on-going crowd interaction to propagate its behavior, or,” keep the lights on.”

Some Google Sketchups were created:

This first sketch shows the six foot structure with an assortment of illuminated windows, akin to an apartment tower at night, w/ residents inside watching tv.  The planned interaction for this mode was to have the crowd turn on the windows by touching them, after which the window remains lit for a period of time before turning off again; constant interaction is needed to keep the piece illuminated.

The sketch below shows off the full color (RGB) capabilities of the piece. Animations like this could be used in a game play mode to signify winners:

Read on for technical details of the project and to see the finished piece . . .

Design + Fabrication

Fabrication was key to this project, for providing a robust, polished product.  With the help of Flux Lighting, we finalized the structure design and they provided some exciting renderings:

The bare structure

Structure with acrylic windows installed

The illuminated piece

In parallel to the design and fabrication of the structure, the electronics and lighting were designed and assembled.

The greatest technical challenge was making each window individually touch responsive.  Our first impulse was to have an IR transmitter/emitter pair behind each window to sense a hand blocking the window; this was quickly put to rest by trying to fire IR through the acrylic only to have it bounce directly back and flood the sensor, making it only useful for detecting the acrylic windows themselves.  Perhaps a combination of IR and IR-response cameras would do the trick, but we avoided this approach due to complexity and space issues inside the structure.  The thought of wiring up individual piezo elements to each window, or some sort of physical switch, was too labour-intensive seeing as there are a total of 120 windows.

The most promising and scalable solution seemed to be capacitive touch sensing.  We originally thought of using a dedicated chip like this, but after learning about the CapSense library — which works with minimal external parts on an Arduino — we decided to test a mock-up touch surface.

The advantage of the capacitive sensing was that we could use a row/column matrix arrangement, thus only needing 11 sense electrodes for the 30 windows of each fixture side (five for the columns, and six for the rows).  This conveniently used 11 of the Arduino digital pins, while leaving the two serial pins free for communication.  Four dedicated Prototinos were used, one for sensing the windows on each side of the fixture.

In consideration of budget vs. labor, Shiftbrites were used for the lighting.  Each window has a single Shiftbrite mounted behind it, allowing for full color (RGB), individual control of each window’s illumination.

Based on a previous project by Macetech, makers of Shiftbrites, we used lighting louvers as a substrate to mount the lights on.  Here’s a pic of our assembled “light cage:”

With lighting and touch sensing in place, we focused on a control scheme, deciding on an external control scheme, allowing the fixture’s behavior to remain easily reprogrammable.  Our specific arrangement made use of a custom computer-based control panel written in Processing.

Here’s a schematic the control scheme:

The top row shows the four Shiftbrite panels that make up the four walls of the light cage; the 120 Shiftbrites are controlled by a single Prototino, connected to an XBee (and breakout adapter).  The bottom row shows the four acrylic panels, each having a capacitive sensing matrix connected to a corresponding Prototino and XBee/breakout combo (I attempted to utilize serial messaging between the touch sense controllers with a single XBee to take care of all the messaging for the four sides, but I obtained much better results using individual XBees than ironing out my own protocol).  On the right is a laptop, running the control software, and communicating with the touch panels and the light cage: the touch panels only send data to the control software when a touch is registered, and the control software then processes that information and sends appropriate commands to the light cage; calibration and debugging messages can also be sent between the control software and the touch panels and light cage.

Here’s an early pic of the control software and corresponding lights:

When the galvanized steel structure was available from the fabricators, it was time to assemble everything.  This stage took a considerable amount of time since all the elements had exact mounting points that had to be accurately drilled to match the precise machining of the structure.

The below pic shows one of the window touch panels mounted to the inside of its corresponding structure wall:

You can clearly see the row/column touch electrodes; each intersection corresponds with the middle of a window, so when someone touches a window, which particular one can be determined from the corresponding row/columns registering a touch.  This arrangement worked surprisingly well (after debugging some grounding and interference issues caused by the metal structure itself).

Here’s a pic showing three assembled sides of the structure while the power to the light cage is checked and double-checked:

The light cage is attached to a steel plate that mates with the top of the structure, so it literally hangs in the middle of the inside of the structure, each light aligned with a specific window.

The below pic better illustrates how I actually felt getting everything together under the tight deadline for the debut of the piece at Urbana:

In situ

After getting everything assembled and tested, it then all had to be torn down again for transportation to the event.  I think once re-assembled and powered up at the venue, the final result was well worth the effort:

Installation view

detail view

The crowd also seemed to enjoy it and it certainly made for an interesting conversation piece:

We were pretty proud as well:

The Latest Artists (Deborah + Andrew O’Malley)

. . . and Aksash Sinha of Dharma Developments was very happy w/ the literal and illuminating tie-in to the evening’s cause:

Andrew + Deborah O’Malley and Akash Sinha

Afterthoughts

So what did we learn?

Timeline management of supply chain and fabrication is crucial.  Thank goodness for overnight shipping and a highly helpful and skillful fabrication team.

Capacitive sensing is touchy!  A major problem we encountered was tuning the capacitive touch system.  The circuit exhibited varying behavior between all environments from proof-of-concept to final integration with the structure.  We experienced noise problems when using the touch panels near the lights, and further interference when the arrangement was placed into the metal structure (common grounding solved most of these issues — subject to a blog post all their own).  The biggest downfall to this sensitivity was experienced during the move from studio testing to the actual venue: in the studio we had to use sensitive settings to obtain usable touch data, while once in the venue, the control software was receiving so much touch data that it became overwhelmed and couldn’t control the lighting exactly has planned.

Shiftbrites are simple in theory — the control data gets passed along nicely from the controller to each respective light along the chain — but have many practical caveats: power needs to be injected along the chain to keep things stable; the power supply used has implications; a long chain of Shiftbrites seems very susceptible to interference/glitches on the data lines, resulting in unwanted behavior (solved largely in software); and you must be very careful interconnecting Shiftbrites as they are easily damaged irreparably (make sure to order a contingent stash!).  Diffusion needs to be well thought-out as well.

Next plans?

We received a lot encouraging feedback on the fixture from the Urbana crowd and several offers of interest to host it at other events/venues, so we’re currently considering these options along w/ plans to tour the piece around other events/festivals where it can be programmed to compliment their themes.

In the meantime, we’ll be refining the control software and programming/capabilities of the fixture.  We also hope to improve the internal light cage, as it was quite fragile for transportation/installation; along with adding a grid of  blinds inside the structure to better isolate each Shiftbrite’s light output to it’s specific window as we experienced a bit of light overlap between windows.

Stay tuned for updates . . .

Acknowledgments

Writing this summary, I’d like to thank Deb for taking this on with me as one of our more complex projects as The Latest Artists to date.

Together, we’d like to thank the team at Dharma Developments for inviting us to participate in Urbana 2011; we’ve been keen to work on something inspired by the evolving, ambient light patterns of apartment towers at night, and Urbana 2011 provided the perfect impetus to get a project like this started.

Big thanks to Dan and Caleb at Flux Lighting for all their interest in, enthusiasm for, and enabling of this project on the fabrication side.

Garrette at Macetech was extremely helpful with his knowledge of Shiftbrites and seems very comitted to helping customers get their ideas up and running.

Thanks also to the City of Ottawa, their funding and support has also been instrumental in realizing this project.

Further reading

The Ottawa Citizen covered the event here, and if you’re still hungry for more pics, there’s another album here.

Cube Gallery is pleased to announce that our wildly popular Great BIG Smalls Show is back for a sixth year of offering unique gifts of original art from across Canada. Small pieces – perfect for Christmas gift-giving – are already arriving from New York, Powell River B.C., Barry’s Bay Ont., Montreal, Toronto and the Ottawa-Gatineau region.  This annual juried show boasts nearly 60 artists and more than 300 works of art.  Plan to arrive on the first day for what has become one of Cube’s most anticipated annual events and to fully appreciate the astonishing scope of artistic talent on display.  Original art for the discerning kids and adults on your Christmas list – the gift that appreciates and will be appreciated for a lifetime.

I had a sneak peak at some of the work while dropping of a series of new light boxes the other night and it looks like this is going to be a great show!

As for the light boxes, Deb and I have collaborated on a new series of animated, graphic light boxes that we’re really excited about.

With so many artists involved in the show, it’s sure to be a really fun opening with an interesting and eclectic crowd.

See you Thursday eve.!

It already feels like I have more projects than the time to complete them   I’ve secured an “artist in residency” position with NYC Resistor, where I have open access to their space, including all the electronics tools I’ll need along with some cool fabrication tools, including a laser cutter.

[ more after the break ]

While here, I’m planning to work on the software for the upcoming light cube:

along with developing an open-source clock kit around the Electric Window 3 platform:

including a nifty enclosure fabbed on the laser cutter, or perhaps even the Makerbot, which will be aided by the convenience of Makerbot Industries and NYC Resistor being neighbors in the same building:

In addition to my self-guided residency at NYC Resistor, I’ll also be interning at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in the Chelsea district of Manhattan:

[ pic from Flickr ]

At Eyebeam, I’ll be working with Hernani Dias, developing new hardware for his Refarm the City project.  A large portion of his project revolves around series of electronic boards which are responsible for monitoring and automatically feeding small urban farms (gardens).

[ pic from Hernani's blog ]

Specifically, I’ll be working on a board which visualizes data collected from a farm/garden with a reconfigurable LED display; the main idea being the ability to monitor data remotely without having to use a computer — a great overlap with my personal lighting projects which I’ve been long wanting to make internet-enabled.

And what of DJ/VJ’ing you may ask?  Well, Deb is here in NYC with me, and we indeed have a few things lined up.  The first being a performance this Saturday, July 17, at Disorient’s Compressor VI event.

So much to do, so little time . . . literally!

TWITTER ACTIVATED LIGHT BOXES ON DISPLAY AT ORIENTAL CHARM GIFT SHOP [ 653 SOMERSET ST. W., OTTAWA ] FROM MAY 8 – JUNE 8 2010

Ottawa (Ontario) – You won’t want to miss it! Ottawa’s second annual Chinatown Remixed event is happening Saturday, May 8, from 2-5 p.m.

Walk the streets of Somerset West as you take in dazzling contemporary local art, mixed in with Chinatown’s traditional shops and restaurants.

One of the highlights of this year’s festival is an interactive lighting display by The Latest Artists — Ottawa’s dynamic artistic duo, Andrew and Deborah O’Malley.

The Latest Artists have created Twitter-enabled light boxes. These unique pieces feature custom-built circuits and hand-made acrylic frames.

Using a mobile phone, audiences will be able to interact with the art by sending messages to Twitter (using the hash tag #CTRM).

Thanks to creative custom software, audience messages will be instantly displayed as text scrolling across the lightbox screens. Strobe lights, placed near the boxes, will flash when the message appears, altering audiences their Tweet is coming through.

When no one is sending a Tweet, the light boxes will display scrolling fortune cookie messages, lucky numbers, and animated geometric patterns. Previous Tweets will also be saved and randomly displayed, serving as an archive of audience experiences over the month-long event.

Giving audiences the ability to comment and connect through lighting art with Twitter is a novel interactive experience, providing global reach to the local Chinatown Remixed event.

The Latest Artists’ twitter-enabled light boxes will be on display at the Oriental Charm Gift Shop (located at 653 Somerset Street West) from May 8 – June 8, 2010.

We were pretty pleased with our first attempt at constructing and gluing a 3D object from acrylic.

The LED matrix and controller are from SeeedStudio, and the next steps for us will be to develop content for the LEDs, and refine the acrylic enclosure design.

Another consideration will be whether to stick with a corded DC adapter for power, or go with (rechargeable) batteries.  The pro for a DC adapter is that it takes no additional space in the enclosure, while the flip-side con of batteries is that the extra space required in the enclosure may affect the aesthetics.  Batteries will also need to be recharged or changed as a trade-off for going cordless.  What would you prefer (let me know in the comments)?

Here’s a few more pics:

And a last one for scale:

More pics and video to come as things develop here in the lab!

]]> http://technoetc.net/blog/2010/01/31/light-cube-prototype/feed/ 4 http://technoetc.net/blog/2009/12/14/interactive-audiovisual-installation/ http://technoetc.net/blog/2009/12/14/interactive-audiovisual-installation/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:01:59 +0000 ao http://technoetc.net/blog/?p=178 Just finished a proof-of-concept video for an interactive audio/visual installation, where the audience become the performers in a room-sized drum machine with blinking lights and sychronized video:

The audio is straight from a drum machine, triggering the video in real time which is done in Processing; this initial draft shows that this is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible . . .

Dawghaus Studios put a video together of the event featuring some of our music, video, and performance — along with Spacing-related content, too, of course

On Friday evening, Artengine’s new media Nite Ride exhibition opened, and I got to enjoy the first ride of the night, listening to Tim Hecker’s custom 5.1 channel surround soundtrack to a drive through the Gatineau Hills.

Guerilla mag has a great video from opening night that gives you a much better sense of the project than my prose:

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to go on the next ride for Marla Hlady’s work, but I’ll be back during the week, as Nite Ride runs until Oct. 31.

We had to leave the Nite Ride opening early as Deb and I had to set up for our DJ/VJ performance as The Latest Artists at Lotus Lounge in Ottawa later that night. We were booked by Exposure Fridays for their Halloween-themed party, and were excited to share another bill w/ Kevan Fraser.

With only an hour set time, we went straight to business with dark, rolling, minimal-tech tunes accompanied by synced, abstract and spooky-themed video — our specialty Not sure if we’ll get any documentation from this one, though, but we received lots of great feedback after our set.

Again we had to leave early to prepare for another commitment the next morning:

The Conjunction Collective’s exhibition, Civilization and its Discontents, opening on Saturday eve. in Toronto, for which I still needed to install my light portion of the show.

The organisers gave me free reign of the gallery basement for my lighting work, so I reprogrammed and refurbished a handful of pieces to display in the space.

Installation went really smooth thanks to dedicated assistance from Deb and my good friend, Dan. The opening party was a blast, and I received lots of positive feedback about my lighting work, which was really encouraging to hear from a Toronto crowd since it was my first lighting exhibition there.

Deb got lots of great documentation that I’ll share soon, but in the meantime, I invite you to check out this photo set by co-organiser, Jen Lee.

Deb and I are headed out west from Ottawa all the way to Vancouver for a summer DJ/VJ performance and workshop tour as The Latest Artists!

All the info, dates, and documentation (pics and vids) will be available on our new fan page on Facebook. Check it out and follow along!

Happy summer!