INDUSTRY ICONS
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Tangle combines light and motion to create a sense of organised chaos
swing moving backwards and forwards to make the wings flap. That ended up being huge because it did something I thought wasn’t possible, which was to make an immersive piece – big enough to encompass lots of people – that was also interactive. Mariposa struck this fantastic combination where most of the show, music and lights run in a pre-recorded, pre-programmed manner. There’s one interactive component: the flapping of the wings. You can just give people the tiniest little thing that’s interactive and they’ll love it. What compelled you to create your own software, LED Lab? In 2013, I’d come home from Burning Man having done fire art yet again, and was totally tired of it. A friend of mine had created an LED controller called Pixel Pusher. You can write your own software and send UDP packets to it, you can plug LED devices into it and it will display on those devices. I had the idea for a piece called Tangle , a 30in-diameter ball of LEDs arranged randomly. It’s transparent; you can see through it. I did maps from 16 different angles, making a complete circle, then animated between those views. It was a pretty cool piece. I was, and still am, an iPhone and iPad programmer, and this piece I did on an iPad. And why not? The iPad is a damn cool platform. It has tremendous computing power, it’s got a camera, can detect movement, it’s got good audio. When I was done making the custom iPad app for Tangle, I looked at it and said, “If I generalise this a little bit, I think people would like it.” That app became what is now known as LED Lab. I ended up putting it on the App Store in early 2014 and it’s continued selling ever since. Do I make a lot of money on it? Absolutely not. It’s a hobby and what money I get is nice, but it’s mainly a token. What’s really cool is that I’ve put a powerful tool in the hands of thousands of LED artists around the world. It just keeps growing. I’ve been working on it for ten years and I keep adding more features. I’m really proud of it. That’s a huge part of my technical ‘stack’, as we call it. It is, as far as I know, the only client app on iPad and I think it’s the easiest client app to get rolling with. Most LED artists don’t use it and that’s fine with me, but I still think that, particularly as a beginner, it’s hard to get any easier than LED Lab and I’m very proud. Your work requires extensive knowledge of art and technology. What are some of the challenges that get overlooked regarding this? For my own pieces, I go from LED Lab via the Pixel Pusher protocol to the
controller I run on a Raspberry Pi. I drive SK9822 chips and also use 5v LEDs. Typical LEDs – almost every other LED out there – take one byte for red, one for green, one for blue. That’s 24-bit colour resolution, which is all fine and good if you’re running them near full brightness. But what happens if your client says, “This is too bright. Can you dim it down and make it half brightness?” Light is perceived logarithmically, so when you reduce to half brightness, you go down to about an eighth of the power. So what happens at 1/8 power when you have eight bits for red, green and blue? You’re dividing by eight and your colour quality has gone to crap. You can see it immediately. Each of the SK9822 chips have – in addition to those three bytes for red, green and blue – a five-bit field called global brightness. The chip multiplies each component by this global brightness value to scale the output brightness. If the client does want brightness down by half, meaning 1/8 power, a good software will simply scale down that five-bit value. Honestly, I take advantage of this all the time. Are there any tools out there that make LED art more accessible? There’s a new piece of technology on the scene that’s changed everything, called WLED. It’s an open-source software package that runs on a tiny microcontroller called ESP32. You can buy an ESP32 on Amazon for about five bucks. That’s incredibly cheap and WLED
is free. It’s hard to argue with and a lot of people are gravitating towards it. At Burning Man, you received positive feedback about Mariposa ’s interactivity. In future, would you try to create more interactive displays? Yes, I did one this year. Are you familiar with the concept of the Tibetan prayer wheel? If you walk into a Tibetan monastery, there are often these giant cylinders that spin on vertical axes. You can spin them with your hand, and engraved on the surface of these cylinders is the ancient poem – peace prayer – Om Mani Padme Hum . Every time the cylinder spins, the prayer is said and everyone is encouraged to spin the cylinder to bring more peace into the universe, a tiny bit at a time. I made for Burning Man this year a piece I called Mani Padme . It is a 9ft- tall, 5ft-diameter Tibetan prayer wheel consisting of 32 vertical columns of LEDs. When you spin them, you see images on the surface of the cylinder using persistence of vision, just like with Paraluna . A lot of my pieces now use this concept, where I have strips of LEDs moving quickly past the eye, changing colours so fast that the eye doesn’t register the changes. They call it a POV (persistence of vision) piece. Mani Padme is a cylinder on which, when you spin it, images appear. At the same time, a speaker plays a Tibetan chant. I’m very happy about it. I intend to use this style much more and I’m always thinking
Mani Padme was inspired by the structure of Tibetan prayer wheels
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