This website has been archived.
See www.seanclark.org and www.interactdigitalarts.uk for information about Sean Clark's current artwork and projects.

Esther Rolinson's Flown

Tue, 27 Oct 2015

Esther Rolinson's Flown

This weekend I was helping to install Esther Rolinson's "Flown" artwork in York. The piece is part of the Illuminating York festival that is running in the city all this week. I've worked with Esther before on the Melt, Splinter and Thread installations at Phoenix last year. This new artwork builds on the technology developed for these pieces and takes the form of a cloud-like structure that is illuminated with with flowing light patterns.

My main contribution to the project has been in developing an Arduino-powered hardware module that takes light sequences (produced in Processing and saved as a data file) and plays them through a DMX lighting system from an SD card. This technology means that, unlike the previous artworks, the installation can run without the need for a dedicated desktop computer.

The systems works well. Under Esther's guidance, over 25 patterns were produced and saved to the SD card and the artwork runs through them autonomously. The artwork itself looks beautiful, with subtle light patterns that sometimes resemble lightening, then moonlight, or even a swarm of fireflies.

The artwork is on for a week. My pictures from the installation can be found here on Flickr.

Author: Sean Clark