This piece has a colourful history

The original, static fixture shown above was built for Cube Gallery’s 2008 exhibtion, Homage, which asked participating artists to create an homage to an important influence on their art.

I chose to make a wall-mounted rendition of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent installation, “untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim)”:

For the Conjunction Collective show this fall, I decided to animated the piece . . .

I had an older, unfinished light work on the bench that I’ve slowly been pecking at for parts, based around a PIC-controlled relay board — with a little reprogramming, I’d have a quick update for the Flavin homage without having to build any new hardware.

First order of business was to make sure the old control board was still working, so I set to work with the cursed alligator clip connections:

I say cursed because I find it all too easy to short circuit something while working with the clips, but the ease and speed with which you can get components talking with one other is too tempting to pass up.

This is a common sight on my bench while I’m experimenting, and I’m sure I’m not alone on this one.

Here’s a close up of the old control board, still in its original project enclosure:

The red light is on, a good sign! The board was working fine, so I set about programming it specifically for the Flavin piece. Since everything was (temporarily) connected I figured I may as well get it behaving satisfactorily before mounting it up permanently in its new home.

I’d built this particular board before discovering Arduino, so it was based around a PIC 16F628. I like these chips because they have an internal oscillator (no external parts needed) and have enough input/output ports for smaller projects. Plus, there’s a couple free compilers out there.

I wrote up a new program in Hi-Tech C with a bunch of new functions for actuating the lights, only to discover it wouldn’t compile due to the math library needed for random numbers exceeding the available memory space on the chip.

My ideal solution would’ve been to just stick an Arduino chip on the board, but there was neither room to mount a new socket for it nor a matching pin-out (compatibility) with the existing chip.

Wanting to stick with the original plan of reusing hardware rather than building something new, I turned back to a previous (free) compiler in my toolkit: XCSB BASIC. It didn’t take too long to rewrite my C functions into BASIC, and soon enough I had the Flavin piece up and running to my liking.

I mounted the reprogrammed control board on the back of the piece:

Not the cleanest cable management, but it did the trick:

The chip still has 12 unused input/output ports, so there’s lots of room for expansion by the way of input sensors and additional outputs if need be. The Flavin piece is only using four of the eight available (yellow) relays already on the board.

Here’s a video showing it’s behavior. It has three modes which are randomly chosen for a random duration: toggle / change the state of a colour; only one colour on at a time; and any combination of colours. In each case, the colour to modify is random, as is the interval between colour changes. I like a lot of randomness

The video includes sped up and time-lapsed footage, as the actual timing of the piece varies between the speeds shown below and substantially slower; in an attempt to not bore viewers, I took a “flashier” approach to the video documentation.

[ As an aside about the music in the vid., normally for my videos I like to use some loops or beats I've already recorded, but in this case, I was coming up empty handed in my search for the right vibe amongst my existing recordings. So on went the drum machine, I picked a few sounds I'd previously tweaked, and recorded the soundtrack live into the video as a "voice over." I was quite happy with the results and perhaps it'll be the start of a new track? ]

I decided to name the piece “Flaven” after my misspelled BASIC file for the program.

Something that really became pronounced to me after animating a Flavin-like piece is the contrast between Flavin’s use of direct and reflected light. Seems obvious in writing, but the effect this new piece has when throwing light around an exhibition space is quite dramatic!

This piece and several others can be seen at the Conjunction Collective show in Toronto until November 8, 2009.

Pics and vids from the exhibition coming soon; in the meantime, check it out in person if you can!

Rémi took the KD photo on the hotplate before disassembling it, had the photo printed in 3D, then removed the hotplate from its aluminum frame to replace it with the photo:

In the meantime, I mounted cold cathode lights to the inside of the back panel and built a wooden extension for the frame so it would be deep enough for the light to diffuse properly:

An interesting project I was happy to be part of . . .

If you need a custom light box, don’t hesitate to get in touch about your project!

and my Conduit sculpture

I realized that experimenting with new projects with similar lights would be easier with a common development platform . . .

As part of a larger project supported by an artist grant from the Ontario Arts Council, I was able to build a prototype light sequencer, based on a PIC 16F877 microprocessor and two custom solid-state-relay output boards:

The PIC model was chosen based on its native I/O capabilities (16 digital outputs and several digital and analog inputs), and the solid-state-relays were chosen based on their high current carrying capability and low on-resistance, resulting in a negligible voltage drop across the relay (I couldn’t find an ideal transistor with a consistently low voltage drop when switching different load types such as cold cathode tube ballasts vs. EL wire ballasts, and was thus dissatisfied with the amount of voltage I was losing just to the transistor when switched on).

The PIC controls the output relays to directly switch the power from an external power supply to the loads (lights, motors, etc.); the advantage of this arrangement is that the output voltage and total available power of the sequencer is governed by this power supply which can be easily substituted based on the voltage and current requirements of a particular project.

The modular design of the system — main processor board and separate relay boards — allows me to mount the sequencer on the back of fixtures

or house it in its own enclosure:

The control board also has screw terminals for attaching input modules, such as this prototype proximity sensor based on a Sharp IR sensor:

Having a modular, easy-to-connect framework for the controller, sensor modules, and lights allows me to quickly experiment with various interactive arrangements, and has lead to several site-specific, interactive lighting installations.

Below are a few sample videos of some temporary installations built with the system. These installations used several motion sensors to control the light colour based on the direction or location of people in the exhibition space, while controlling the speed of the sequence based on the number of people passing through the space; the installations’ behaviour were thereby a reflection of the human activity within the space.

Future plans for the sequencer include migrating from a PIC processor to an Arduino (simply by changing the processor board), making more input modules, and creating a wireless network between the input and output modules.

More info can be found here.