Kinetic Light Midterm Project: Walking Shadows —— Skye Gao (Eric Parren)

Project name: Walking Shadows

Professor: Eric Parren

Documented by: Skye Gao

Date: April. 14th, 2019

Project Description:

Walking Shadows is a sculptural light installation with a combination of digital fabricated sculptures and generative lighting devices. Shadows of static sculptures are projected on the wall by five halogen lights which are programmed to wink in random sequences to display shadows in movements. The installation is designed to provide immersive experiences in larger space. When audiences enter the illuminated space, their own shadows and movements will be casted on the wall and become part of the dynamic silhouettes. 

The core concept of this project is to create motions of static objects through the play of light and shadows in an exhibition space. The ideas are largely inspired by art works of Christian Boltanski and Olafur Eliasson. 

Christian Boltanski’s art work of Théâtre d’ombres (Theatre of Shadows)  provides senses of space constructed by lights and shadows; while Olafur Eliasson’s project “Multiple Shadow House” explores the consciousness of human Cody by visualizing and enlarging people’s every movement through arrays of overlapping shadows.

Drawn from these art works, shadows can provides instant evidence of presence and motion in a dynamic space. My project therefore intends to explore with such nature of shadow by combing vivid display of shadows and manipulation of lighting sources in one installation. 

Perspective and Context

The implementation of my project is mainly based on technical understanding of lightings and shadows, but its effect owes much to people’s perception. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty states in his book The World of Perception, “the world is not made up of space and things” but also includes “[our] own vision of things.” Such understanding provides possibility to modify or even re-create our perception of surroundings. As Olafur Eliasson talks about his work of “Multiple Shadow House”, he said:”[Shadow] is a consequence of your being there.” Based on such understanding, by intentionally control what people perceive at one single moments, this project manages to break the sequence of present and re-create a spacial and temporal experience for audience. By participating into the interaction of lights and shadow, people are provided with a way to re-think and re-process the perception of time, space and presence. 

Development & Technical Implementation

Materials: 

• 1* laser-cutter box
• 1 * Breadboard 144
• 1 * Arduino DFRobot Mega 2560
• 1 * USB A to B Cable
• 1* 12V power adapter (350W)
• 1* barrel power jack
• 5* 10k resisters
• 5* 12V/20WHalogen lights
• 5* TIP122
• N* Jumper Cables (Hook-up Wires)

  

Pre-construction tests & material preparation

With reference to my project idea, the installation mainly includes two parts: fabricated sculpture and lighting components (circuits). Since the sculpture part should not be in a large scale, to project shadows on to the wall, the lighting choice is very essential. As the LEDs we got practiced with in class are not bright enough for the effect, I first tested the lighting efficiency with three DMX lights and some human shapes roughly cut out of paper.

The test results showed that with lights shining from different directions to the sculpture, it can create a moving effect of the shadow. However, the shadows were extremely blurred with DMX lights as the lights were consisted of groups of small LEDs. Each of the LEDs will cause a slight drift of the shadow and thus display a ghosting result.

Testing demo shown as below:

Drawn from this test, instead of just using “strong” lights, to create clear and

efficient shadows what I need are single lights that are focused and intensive. From my research, torch lights and halogen lights can be two preferences. So I went to the electronic market to test and purchase some. Based on my field test and the sellers’ recommendations, compared to torch LEDs, halogen lights are more affordable and similarly efficient in terms of lighting. 

Therefore, I bought five 12V/20W halogen bulbs with lamp holders.

Since I have never encountered halogen light before, and there were concerns about its adaptability with Arduino, I was very cautious about its implementation. I did large amount of researches, and found this workable reference for its circuits: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/gr1m/lighthouse-3d-print-and-arduino-c46899. I adjusted the circuit and added four more halogen lights to it. However, since each halogen light needs 12V/20W power supply to ensure the brightness, and the ER only has two adaptors that can provide such power supply, I could only test without full lighting brightness  at first before having a new power supply (12V/350W).

I then proceeded to build the human-shaped sculptures using laser cutting. The shapes were sketch out with reference to online images using Illustrator. I first cut out five shapes for test and later had more. 

The whole process of building the installation includes constant tests and adjustments. The first stage was to ensure the lighting efficiency and shadow outcomes of halogen lights. In a closer distance, the outcome went quite well:

Construction of installation & programming 

The next step was to create the moving effect of shadows, which was to program the lights. The sketch I used was modified from the example code AnalogWriteMega, which arranges the pins in a sequence with switch() function to control the signals. 

Since I had five lights, such sketch required using a Arduino DFRobot Mega 2560 board instead of a Arduino Genius Uno board.

To create a generative moving effect of crowds, I programmed the lights to go on with random orders and with an amount of one or two, so that each time there would be a different combination of shadows. The test demo of lights sequence and shadow combination are shown as below:

Then I stepped to test the display of shadows on a distant wall by adjusting distance between lights-sculptures-wall. Test demo shown as below:

With the effects of lighting and shadows almost settled, I proceeded to build a container to arrange and place all my lights and circuits. I again used laser-cutting to build a box and plugged in the lights through the hole on the front of the box. Also, to expand the scale of the shadows, I increased the length of the box .

Installation placement & final result

The final appearance of the whole installation are shown as below. Since the lights were placed in the middle of the box, the sculptures needed to be raised up to the same level in order to show completed shadow shapes. So I used a large board as platform to hold all the sculptures. Considering that the placement of each sculpture and the distance among them would change each time the whole installation were moved, I did not fix the sculptures to the lighting device but rather placed them in a removable way. 

With the installation well constructed, I proceeded to find a proper space for the presentation. From previous tests results, the lighting effect would worke best in an open room of complete darkness. The final results were displayed and documented in Room 825 at midnight, and the documentation video are shown as below:

Presentation

The presentation happened in Room 821, as it was hard to find an open but also pinch-dark room for the morning presentation. The audience were supposed to wander around and experience their existences among the changing of shadows by themselves.  But considering the time and space limitation, each time I could only allow no more than four audiences into the room and guided them into the immersive experience by demonstration. Also, since the wall for shadow display during presentation was not long enough, the shadows would be projected onto the sides walls and be distorted a little bit, but it at the same time managed to create another surrounding spatial effect. 

In general, the presentation went quite well. The audience were able to understand and appreciate the moving effect of shadows and participated in the immersive experience. Some of the feedback and critiques include: 

1. There would be more space for programing the sequence of lights: instead of letting the lights going off completely the same time, the composition could have some lights still fading off as other lights turning on to generate a more consistent and apparent moving effect. The shining speed of lights could also be improved as now the time span for each frame of shadows was quite long and somehow decreased the feeling of moving. Faster speed to light changing may better fit people’s visual perception of motions. 
2. The choice of lights could be more dynamic: The Halogen lights I used only have warm yellow color. A different tone/combination of light colors could generate a completely different effect or circumstance, but the result would need more tests. 
3. Motion of sculptures: as for future projects, I could add on motion to the sculpture and create a much more kinetic objects. 

Conclusion

The whole process of building this project is an integration of research, test, construction and modification. Though I did not utilize too much objects from class, the skills of technical implementation like soldering, laser-cutting and programming contributed a lot to the progress. By doing something “ambitious”, I also got to cultivate my abilities of testing, researching and self-learning.   I enjoyed the process of discovering new technics and skills very much, but also met many challenges during the process. For example, because I did not full understand the theory of current, I postponed my schedule for several days as I thought school’s adaptor would not work (though it would). Also, I demonstrated the circuit wrongly to a classmate and led to a server derange to Arduino board. Though failure is also part of the process of learning, I think for future  study I still need to prepare myself more before actually starting implementation. Moreover,  it can be seen from the feedbacks that people’s perception really varies on an individual level, it also provides clues for my future improvement  or projects that I should always consider more possibilities from audience’s perspective.