INSPIRATION
In December of 2017, Kyle and I attended the Day for Night festival in Houston, TX. In my 25 years of attending, creating and performing in music and art events, this is the one that affected me the most. The art, music and venue fulfilled all of my needs. I left that weekend buzzing with inspiration. Installations by Playmodes, VT Pro, Cocolab and others evoked an emotional experience I’d never felt before. I wanted to create work that would provide that similar feeling to others.
Our 4th project together, Kyle and I dove in shortly after the beginning of the new year. We’d played with LEDs a few times using Processing and Arduino. This is the first time we’d worked with TouchDesigner though. There were a few things to wrap our heads around between the software, hardware and fabrication. I do better on the creative side. Kyle is a genius in making things work.
“Cluster” by Playmodes was a huge inspiration for this piece. Without copying their genius, I wanted to provide a similar experience by surrounding viewers with light synced to a thematic soundtrack. That required tightly moving LEDs to individual sounds of music. It needed to be done on a granular note based level. Reactive visuals were not what I was after. Each lit up LED require a purpose and intention.
APPROACH
After working with video projections on rectangular screens in my days as a VJ, I welcomed the creative limitation of a 1-dimensional visual output. LED strips were fairly easy to work with but a challenge to make interesting. After a few nights of experimentation, I quickly realized I needed 3 dimensions. A structure to map the strips to. After a weekend of prototyping and a few trips to the craft store I landed on the tetrahedron. I’ve always been fascinated with sacred geometry. It’s in my DNA.
The tetrahedron provided a lot of creative opportunity when it came to building animations specific to that shape. Each segment, triangle and the entire structure as a whole could be considered when coming up with movement. I really wanted to use the entire structure and consider all angles when designing animations. Mapping it from one angle just wasn’t that interesting. Light the traveled along and moved from segment to segment was what I envisioned.