I got the inspiration for this project in the Spring Festival break on the flight back from my hometown. It was around five o’clock and I was able to see the entire sunset in the sky from beginning to end. My partner was keen on using music at first to represent the “beginning and middle and end” but after I’ve introduced this idea of mimicking a sunrise or a sunset we were quickly on board with the theme.

We had many versions of ideation on how to present the process. I first suggested making a half transparent cube where we would put the lights inside and maybe have some paper cuttings stick to the upward side of the cube to indicate the context of it recreating a natural phenomenon. My partner later came up with a better idea of making a 3-dimensional landscape that beings more depth to the visual effect, which we eventually adapted for our project.

Before laser cutting we had a long discussion on what material we should be using. We thought about transparent or dark acrylic, but in the end settled in simply plywood because I believe using transparent material for the entire body of the project would just “get light all over the place and not be able to keep them in the frame where we want to focus”.

On the day of our appointment in the fab lab I had to build the box (picture below) alone because my partner had another project she to rush and get done. She made a beautiful graph for the hills but sadly the length of the rectangle pieces don’t fit together very well, so when I was sticking the outer square frame I stuck them together in a way that the crack is at the bottom was at the bottom so it wasn’t very obvious (and it even looks a bit like a river at the foot of the hills). And I added the white acrylic last minute to defuse the matrix’s light, and it worked very well.

For the code we referenced this code. We first tried many example codes including “fire” and “pacific”, but they weren’t suitable enough to be edited to achieve the effects we wanted. For instance, I managed to get the “pacific” code into a gradient pink but couldn’t make it shift between red and orange. We then turned to our browser and found this very smooth red – orange – light blue gradient. Based on the reference code, we made the time span shorter, cutting it down from 30 min to 2 min. There was also one problem we spend a ton of time of was the timing of color shifting. Though the transition is very smooth, about more than 50% of the time it stays in Red. We experimented with numerous way of either changing the function or the numbers in the functions, but it’s either the same or finish the transition form red to blue in less than 2 seconds. I tried to make the number as specific as possible, so that it falls in the perfect spot, and I eventually discovered I had to use two decimal digits to make the timing suitable. This was the most time consuming and challenging part because it also takes a long time for every try and we had to look at the lights directly for a long time.

If we had more time on the project, we would make the box longer do the lights could be hidden inside the project instead of just hanging on the computer behind the box. But overall really like the shadows and the subtle reflections the hills created, and we realized our idea in a relatively satisfied way. 

Here’s the code we used:

#include "FastLED.h"

#define NUM_LEDS 64

#define DATA_PIN 3
#define CLOCK_PIN 13

CRGB leds[NUM_LEDS];

void setup() {
  // Uncomment/edit one of the following lines for your leds arrangement.
  //FastLED.addLeds<TM1803, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<TM1804, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<TM1809, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<WS2811, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<WS2812, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<WS2812B, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  FastLED.addLeds<NEOPIXEL, DATA_PIN>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<APA104, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<UCS1903, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<UCS1903B, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<GW6205, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<GW6205_400, DATA_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);

  FastLED.addLeds<WS2801, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  FastLED.addLeds<SM16716, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<LPD8806, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<P9813, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<APA102, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  FastLED.addLeds<DOTSTAR, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);

  // FastLED.addLeds<WS2801, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<SM16716, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<LPD8806, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<P9813, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  // FastLED.addLeds<APA102, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
  //FastLED.addLeds<DOTSTAR, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, RGB>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
}

void loop() {
  sunrise();

  FastLED.show();
}

void sunrise() {

  static const uint8_t sunriseLength = 30;

  static const float interval = ((sunriseLength * 6.0) / 270) * 1000;

  static uint8_t heatIndex = 0;

  CRGB color = ColorFromPalette(HeatColors_p, heatIndex);

  fill_solid(leds, NUM_LEDS, color);

  EVERY_N_MILLISECONDS(interval) {
    if (heatIndex < 255) {
      heatIndex++;
    }
  }
} 

From the first reading we see the difficulty to the development of light art and why. And in the second reading, while it uses most of it’s space describing specific pieces of art work, there’s a sensible development from the first reading, and what I’ve found most noticeable was the development in technology, that as time passes, artist get to obtain more tools and materials to experiment and play with, bringing more diversity and going on further explorations. I think this in some way helped to gain attention for light art, because along with more explorations, it revealed its potential, and light just starts to feel more exciting.

In Light as Sculpture Medium, it mentioned Robert Whitman who passed away early this year. I looked up some of his works, and I noticed that he often uses projection. Despite a lot of them are not light centered, I find the utilization of projections adds a layer of diversity and flexibility in his work. For example in a performance he created called “American Moon”, projection was incorporated as a part of it. In this way, the narration takes more than the form of seeing actual objects and performers moving around but also moving images in light, which provides audience with different sensational experience, and it breaks the spacial constrains of performance, that with a piece of cloth or any surface, it could generate even more narration that other wise would be hard to present.

Another artist that was mentioned in the reading Phenomenal was Lucio Fontana. I didn’t remember who he was but was reminded immediately by the iconic cuts on papers when looking up. Though seemingly has nothing to do with light and space with the material in these well-known art works consist of only paper, the shape and shadow it creates is made possible by light and a distortion in space, that is, a slit of concave in an originally smooth surface. 

Light allow us to perceive space, and space provide light with transformative shape. Light as a rather flexible “material”, I think can help art to explore more forms of presentation and ways of expression, and sometimes help create art works that teases the human sense and create intriguing distortions of the perception. 

I had the idea of the project when I was taking a walk around the campus. I first thought it would be interesting to walk 顺拐-ly ( a Chinese expression for walking with arms swinging in the same direction as the same-side leg), and then I thought it might be interesting to have people walking under the command of another only that the instruction for direction are the opposite of the intended direction. But then I figured the space inside and near the classroom might be too limited for doing so, thus I turned it into drawing on a piece of paper. 

When designing the shape to draw, I first come up with this bunny. But when considering practicability of drawing such a precise and relatively complex shape, having diagonal lines (and with this bunny probably too many diagonal lines), the interactions would sound too cumbersome as it needs to include both the vertical and diagonal direction and lengths.

So I then tried to design a shape consists only lines going up, down, left, or right. The first shape I drew was a heart, but when testing what it would be like to draw it through verbal instructions, I realized the convex part of a shape will always be drawing in either left or right all the time which would a lot less fun when doing it. And also because it is a symmetrical shape, to would be way predictable. I then drew this cloud shape, which looks a bit better, but despite that it is asymmetrical, the concave ins’t big enough and there’s would still be the always-the-same-direction problem.

In the end, I drew this cat-like shape because the pointy ears would help to create enough concave so that there will be enough variations to the instruction and the shape is also somewhat good-looking. 

But still, the shape seemed a bit too easy to draw, so added a 60 second time restrain to make it more challenging . But telling from actual the presentation, I probably should’ve made harder, whether in the complexity of shape or the length of time, since the participants accomplished drawing the shape quite effortlessly. Though my estimation of setting a 60 second bar was quite accurate because it took them about 65 seconds, but because I timed it in a way that I was the only one who could see the clock, looking back, it would’ve been much better if everyone could see the time, especially the person who is drawing. I should also so enough user testing before presenting to improve my projects next time.

Here’s the finished piece of the presentation:

Here’s a video of the presentation: