Light & Control, NYU, w/ Scott Fitzgerald, Oct 2024, Final Project
From casting shadows on cave walls to harnessing fire, crafting stained-glass cathedrals, and advancing modern physics, humanity has pursued the mastery of light and its energy. With each step, greater benefits have been unlocked. This piece pays homage to that pursuit by creating a piece that felt spiritual, tribalistic, and expressed light in a controlled but slightly fractured way.
Inspired by the imagery above, I also sought to weave interaction into the experience, allowing participants to physically "feel" the light and engage with it directly.
Earlier this year, I crafted a light sequence piece, capturing beams of starlight in a purely analog way: sunlight filtered through punched paper, projecting into a dark box and onto a musical staff. Using Scorpio’s constellation as a template, I placed these "points of starlight" onto the staff, imbuing them with new symbolic meaning. However, the piece remained silent, lacking sensors to translate the visual arrangement into an auditory experience.
I wanted to concentrate my final work on this concept to convert beams of light into and interactive audio experience. This lead to several concepts that I went through, but realized the scale of the project would outweigh the time allotted for the work as well as the time of day of my presentation (after sundown).
Here are four solutions before I finalized on what I could deliver with these constraints:
Room filled with interactive beams of lights
Utilize acrylic and light from LED screen
Multi-constellation music score projected
Scaled down instrument with 96 sensors
Once I honed in on the need to use one sensor I started to think about the floor and ceiling housing and designing what would be necessary to execute on the vision - transform a single room into a temple of light. The “floating” housing was trickier to figure out since it would house a strong beam of light generating heat and be light enough to hang from the ceiling.
There was also an idea of using a concave mirror to intensify the light source a bit more, but that approach would have required a heavier housing and I did not have the time or budget to perfect it for display.
Creating this piece involved a blend of craftsmanship, soldering, and Arduino coding to achieve the intended effect. The floor centerpiece combines micro mirrors, painted in fiery hues and dispersed to mimic a glowing fire—an invitation for people to gather around. The beam of light was a simple solution of a box enclosure of the light source.