I have been doing a lot of reading/thinking/looking/reflecting on light lately and have established two ideas I want to explore through a final project.

Both of my ideas manifest themselves in an installation that manipulates both space and light.  I would begin by taking some of the ideas that Jeffrey Maas and I have investigated in our current exhibit in the Library called visuaLatency, where we are visually and directly mapping the use of space, and combine them with ideas I explored in Sam Jeibman’s Open Source Technology course this past Winter Term where I used Processing, gHwol, Grasshopper and Rhino to define a surface based off a persons movements in space.

Using these ideas along with Arduino, I propose two installations.  The first manifests itself in a dynamic canopy that inhabits either of the light wells on the first floor.  The canopy would begin to respond to the users of a space, engaging them with light and form as they linger or tracing their paths through a space.  The second would be an installation of a [many] luminaire[s].  The space that these would inhabit would preferably be the commons outside of the Library on the first floor, the light well adjacent to that or the double height space between the fourth/fifth floors near Kirsten’s desk.  These “orbs” as I will call them for now will inhabit these spaces and again dynamically reflect the use of the spaces.  They would most likely be lit from within as they are inhabiting spaces without much natural light, but they will change shape depending on various parameters.  Perhaps elongating themselves to engage with lingering individuals or clustering together to create pockets of “activity.”

We can call these morphogeneticField.Canopy and shapeChange.Orbs respectively.