"Electric Tenement" reacting to Tweets @ OpenOttawaLibre 2011

On Sept. 28 2011 I was fortunate to partake in OpenOttawaLibre 2011, an “unconference” that brought together a diverse group of “creatives” from the business, technology, and art sectors in Ottawa. Although the agenda of the day wasn’t entirely clear until the event started – in true “unconference” style – the day was actually a facilitated discussion workshop featuring multiple streams of interest, all derived from the central question:

what do we need to do to create a place that sparks opportunity for creative thinkers to collaborate and innovate for a better Ottawa?

From a general networking perspective, OOL11 proved to be a productive opportunity to meet new people and organizations with overlapping interests and mandates in the city – one particular example standing out being the desire expressed by many groups and individuals to have an Ottawa-based electronic arts festival. Although Ottawa is a relatively small city, it never ceases to amaze me how isolated different groups with similar agendas seem to be here; OOL11 provided a great meeting ground for such groups to discover one another. The enthusiasm generated at the event was also contagious, and served as a valuable reminder of the creative potential in Ottawa; I wish there were more events like OOL11 to help bring a unified focus to our efforts.

From a personal perspective, I was happy to bring new exposure to Artengine’s Electric Fields festival to a targeted, interested audience, as well as meeting a new group of potential collaborators from The City of Ottawa’s Community Arts Program, The Ottawa Art Gallery, and Apartment 613.

I was further fortunate enough to be one of 4 artists invited to showcase technical artwork. I chose to show Electric Tenement (the working name for the lighting tower debuted at Urbana 2011), programmed to react to tweets tagged #OOL11 (shown in the opening photo, above).

Guerilla Magazine wrote a feature on the piece and its role at OOL11 here.

Many thanks to Julie Dupont and Caleb Abbott at The City of Ottawa for all their hard work!  Make sure to check out the OOL11 webpage for more info and ongoing discussions.

"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.

Alongside work by Aili Kurtis, Paul Schibli, Guy Lavigueur, Jennifer Gibbs, Reid MacLachlan, John Roth, and Tony Broderick, I’m debuting work exploring new themes for me: a light piece controlled by the colour of the sky.

The light patterns displayed by Sky Spectrum are directly related to the current sky conditions above Ottawa’s Peace Tower.  Every few minutes, the sky portion of the Hill Cam is analysed to reveal the average red, green, and blue components present in the sky.  The light fixture responds according to the various relationships between these values, presenting an altered view of the sky above, revealing colour details and relationships invisible to the naked eye.

The literal reference to the sky is echoed by the graphic processing portion of the piece which takes place on a remote webserver, in essence utilizing “cloud computing.”

Most of the work indeed takes place on my webserver, where a PHP script analyses the current Hill Cam pic with the GB library.  A small hardware module (hidden in the gallery) consisting of an Arduino development board and ethernet shield fetches the data from the web every few minutes, and sends the data via XBee radio to the light fixture, which is controlled by a custom board with an ATmega328 (running the Arduino bootloader), TLC5940 for driving the LED strips, and an XBee.

The code is only preliminary at this point, and I plan to analyse the daily data collected from the sky to make a growing library of light patterns and blends.  I’m also excited about how scalable the concept is, and look forward to working with this idea on a larger scale.

The Phenomena exhibition runs until Feb. 27, so if you’re in the Ottawa area, please drop by CUBE Gallery (1285 Wellington Ave., W) to check it out.  The best time to view Sky Spectrum is between 4 and 6 pm when the sun is setting and the sky changes relatively quickly

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.!

During the Electric Fields biennial festival of electronic art and music in Ottawa, Karsh Masson Gallery hosted the Prototype exhibition, which focused on the iterative processes behind electronic-based art.

Unfortunately I don’t have as many photos of the exhibit as I’d like, as the whole experience was a bit of a whirlwind, with two days dedicated to installation and only four full days of exhibition.

Since DOTKLOK is still in the prototype/development stage, it made for a perfect candidate for the exhibition.  Alongside a working beta model, I hung a series of photos illustrating the various stages of the clock up to the present, along with a time line documenting DOTKLOK’s progress to date:

Since I consider them “works in progress” which I adapt to the context at hand, I also installed my cold cathode pieces, Flaven and Mantelpiece, in the gallery windows, which provided some extra “flash” to the show in an attempt to grab attention from passers by.

Also in the exhibit was nichola feldman-kiss‘ robotic eye, a video showcase of Gordon Monahan’s speaker swinging technology, and Catherine Richards‘ 3D video experiment, Swim Test:

Of particular interest to me was Donna Legault’s work, which makes use of numerous woofers connected to amplifiers controlled by Pure Data to translate the ambient sound in the exhibition space to “infrasound:” low-frequency signals that rattle the woofers in a more visual manner than aural.  For the Prototype exhibition, Donna was experimenting with inputs from touch sensors located at either side of her installation, transposing the electrical energy picked up from gallery visitors into signals which visibly rocked a “pool” of woofers:

Upon realizing the obvious overlap occurring from Donna’s practice of transforming sound to movement and my regular practice of using movement to trigger lighting, some sort of collaboration was inevitable.

Taking the ethos of the Prototype show to heart, we spent some time in the studio the night before the exhibit opened to get a working proof of concept up and running:

In a short time, we were able to merge our two practices: Donna’s portion listening to the ambient noise in the room with a microphone and sending the transposed infrasound to the speaker, and my part using a light sensor to detect the movement of the speaker cone and modulate the color and brightness of an LED strip.

The result was repeatable enough that we installed it the next day as an impromptu addition to the show:

Perhaps not such an interesting result on its own — and I do wish I’d had a chance to get some better documentation prior to the show’s tear down — but an encouraging combination of electronic practices absent of any electrical connection between the two systems.  I look forward to seeing what we come up with in a larger, more directed context when the opportunity arises!

[ more info after the break]

After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided that the buttons for the final design will most likely be positioned two on each side, as in the first prototype:

My reasons for this are several.  By having the buttons on the side, DOTKLOK becomes a more open platform, perhaps even for lo-fi gaming; since I have a Pong time animation, buttons on the side would allow two people to easily play Pong on DOTKLOK, which would be akward w/ the buttons along the bottom.  From my experience with both arrangements, side situated buttons are also easier to use to control the clock (select the animations and set the time) than a row along the bottom.  The only advantage I really see with the bottom buttons is aesthetic, which is subjective.  I think for a kit that encourages customization, the slight, subjective, aesthetic trade-off is worth it for a more flexible platform.

Also new are a few more animations, such as Percent Time, which shows the time as percentage of the day passed (calculated such that one minute = 0.07%):

Here’s a few pics of the 3rd beta DOTKLOK, before sourcing the black buttons:

The previous photo shows Seconds Time, with the number of seconds passed since midnight in the top row, with the bottom showing seconds in the day remaining.  The next photo shows a more standard Date/Time animation:

DOTKLOK is currently on display at the Manchester Art Gallery’s Make It Yourself show, which is a supporting exhibit to the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer solo show, Recorders.   It’s also on display in Ottawa at the Prototype show, part of Artengine’s biennial, electronic art + sound festival, Electric Fields.

I’m hoping to have the first 25-50 DOTKLOK kits ready to order before December, stay tuned to this blog or the project web page for the latest info, as I’m also considering opening up pre-orders in a week or so . . .

I particularly resonated with this quote from the artist:

I am interested in the idea of generative art and rendering the patterns on the fly, but have not found a way to generate compelling sequences enough of the time.

This presented a perfect opportunity to experiment with interactivity and sensor input for my Electric Window 3 platform.

After sketching out several 1-button game ideas, I decided to move forward with some simple particle systems, controlled by users through their interaction with a single button added to an Electric Window 3 fixture.  Thus was born Electric Window 3B:

[ more info and VID after the break ]

Each time the button is pressed, a new particle (represented by a single LED) is born.  The speed of each new particle is based on the average time between previous births.  Thus, the system has a form of “memory” shaped by previous users.

There are several variants of the particle systems in terms of particle behavior: particles either constantly scroll across the screen and wrap around at the borders; bounce back and forth (or up and down) within the screen; or travel both up and down and side to side, creating the opportunity for collisions.  In the latter case, when the particles collide, they both die.  In all cases, the particle system only has room for so many particles, so after a certain number of births (via button presses), the system resets.  This teases users to find a balance between a “boring” system of few particles versus creating a busy/dynamic system at the risk of killing the whole thing.

The guiding principle was to create an engaging, evolving display from a simple set of rules and user input.

Here’s a video demo:

The curators — Heather Kelly of Kokoromi and Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music/Motion — accepted the piece into the exhibition which took place on March 11-13 2010 at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

I’m now planning to implement particle system animations into future Electric Window 3 fixtures, and more generally, start adding time-based behavior and user input (both direct via buttons etc., and indirect via motion sensors, etc.) to my light fixtures.

It’s always great to have a specific project like this to nudge one along and try out some new ideas and add a new angle to one’s work

This work was generously supported by the art funding program of the City of Ottawa.

Chinatown Remixed runs from May 8 to June 8, 2010, in Ottawa’s Chinatown district. This is the second year for the annual “art walking tour,” where local businesses, restaurants, and shops open their doors to collaborate with artists, providing art “exhibtions in unusual places.”

Last year, Deb and I made a “Chinatown Remixed” sign from electroluminescent (EL) wire, where the various syllables were individually lit, trigged by pedestrian and auto traffic detected by an ultrasonic sensor (see this previous post for details).  This year, the sign is hanging in Umi Cafe (610 Somerset St. W.), although this time driven by random sequences instead of the sensor.

Our new contribution to this year’s event is a window installation at the Oriental Charm gift shop (653 Somerset St. W.):

The installation includes a few light boxes from the Electric Window 4 series:

The main attraction, however, is a group of new Electric Window 3 light boxes, that in addition to their usual geometric and video game -inspired patterns, display messages from Twitter:

[After the break: how it all works and pics of opening day ]

By tagging Twitter messages (Tweets) with the hashtag #CTRM, anyone with a Twitter account can add messages to the installation archive. Between the various animations displayed by the boxes, the boxes query Twitter for new messages (tagged with #CTRM), and if a new message is found, the strobe lights flash and the new message is displayed across one of the boxes:

If no new messages are found, an older, archived message from the #CTRM stream is displayed, but without strobes: the strobes are only used to excitedly punctuate new Tweets

The technology

Here’s a block diagram of the system:

[ bigger version here ]

Starting at the left, there are 4 LED SCREEN light boxes, each with a corresponding STROBE light (only 1 of each is shown). Each LED SCREEN light box has an XBee radio which allows it to communicate wirelessly with the master CONTROLLER. When one of the LED SCREEN light boxes needs a new text string to display, it sends a request via XBee to the master CONTROLLER.

In addition to an XBee radio, the master CONTROLLER also has a WiFi chip which connects wirelessly to the internet (via a wireless router provided by the venue, not shown). When the CONTROLLER receives an XBee request for a new text string, it sends a command to execute a custom PHP script hosted on my website; after a short delay, the CONTROLLER reads the contents of a txt file also hosted on the website.

The PHP script requests the #CTRM stream from Twitter.com, and formats the results for display on the LED SCREEN, it also archives the messages locally on my website; if there is a new Tweet, this is placed in the txt file that the CONTROLLER reads, otherwise an archived message is placed in this txt file. The PHP script also filters the Twitter messages for a list of unapproripate keywords to avoid vulgarities.

If the master CONTROLLER returns a new message to the LED SCREEN, the STROBE lights are also activated for a few seconds to indicate a new message.

The motivation of having the LED SCREEN boxes connected wirelessly to the CONTROLLER was to be able to install the system on-site without having to run a wired serial bus between all the light boxes and the CONTROLLER. Cost was the main motivation for using multiple XBee points connected to one WiFi/ethernet point rather than adding WiFi to each LED SCREEN box. WiFi was chosen for the CONTROLLER so I didn’t have to worry about its placement relative to the internet connection.

Ideally, the STROBE lights would be wirelessly controlled also, but these were a last minute addition to the system — after discovering them in a local dollar store (!) — and are simply wired directly to, and controlled by, the master CONTROLLER with individual power connections; this saved the time, effort, and cost of developing a network to control them, or modifying the LED SCREEN boxes to support them as peripherals. An improvement for the next iteration, perhaps . . .

The exhibtion

Prior to the opening, Deb and I installed the Twitter-enabled boxes within the already-colourful window display at Oriental Charm:

The WiFi controller is located below the display; unfortunately I didn’t take time to snap any pics of it before installing the system so I’ll have to add those later.

Deb designed a great instructional poster for the installation, so we hung that in the window as well:

Here’s the press release we sent out as well, which succinctly describes what to expect from the installation.

On opening day, we did lots of demos, showing people how to add messages to the archive and have them displayed on the boxes:

For those without a Twitter account, or a Twitter-enabled phone (of which there were many), we had a laptop on hand for people to participate through our Twitter account:

Overal, people got a kick out of participating by contributing their own content to the exhibit, and enjoyed the near-immediate gratification of seeing their messages appear with the strobe lights.

We were amused when a friend from Toronto started sending in some “amusing” tweets.

The exbition runs until June 8, 2010. If you’re in the Ottawa area, please check it our for yourself and add some messages! Oriental Charm is located at 653 Somerset St. W., near Bronson, right beside Shanghai Resto.  You can of course participate from anywhere, though, by Tweeting w/ #CTRM

Here’s a few more pics; being a lighting installation, it’s best viewed at night!

Happy to have everything installed, we’re already working on bright ideas for next year

We’d also like to thank the City of Ottawa for its gracious support of this project.