My first intention for this class was to work with shadows created by clear materials, and explore the nuances of how a transparent material can be altered to change the way light shines through it.  It seemed to be a fascinating exploration with a lot of potential for not only a beautiful result, but also a challenging exercise of exploration.  My first pursuits involved cutting, etching, and bending of sheets of acrylic which is a fairly easily material to work with rather than glass.  I used a laser cutter as a resource to rapid prototype my etching  and cutting (this could also be done manually with masking tape sandpaper and a drill).  I then took it a step further and bent sheets  of acrylic, to see how the light would respond as it traveled through the bends.  This exploration had some fairly elegant and abstract results.  learning from etching cutting, and bending I noticed the phenomenon of edge lighting which happens in fiber optics, and lit displays.  I then began researching fiber optics.  I dove into the physics of light, and how fiber optics are being used with modern technology and art.   After research I began experimenting with square and round rods of acrylic at varying sizes.  I tested the ability of light to travel through the rods with light emitting diodes (LEDs) and see which size rods could provide the best travel for the light source.  Once I determined effective sizes and in some cases lengths I began altering the acrylic in similar ways as I altered the sheets of acrylic; etching, cutting, and bending.  The etching of the outside surface allowed the color to escape the acrylic rod really well, but the rod would be fairly dull past the etching.  Bending created some highlights in the rods due to refraction, and the light maintained its intensity past the bends.  The exploration of fiber optics and edge lighting really helped me to under stand the nuances of light traveling through clear materials, and importance of the light sources’ intensity versus the length and width of the material being use.

While experimenting with the acrylic rods I used multiple colors of LED’s and realized that these colors could be mixed and create new colors.  I have work will LED’s a little bit in the past, but never more than one color at at time.  The color wheel that colored light uses is called additive colors, and it is quite easy to understan why.  As more and more colors are added the more light is added, and the colors typically become lighter and eventually turn white.  An example of  additive color gamut is one that most people use every day, and that is Red, Green, and Blue RGB.  Most computer monitors, and Televisions use this color profile to create the images it is displaying.  The RGB gamut is actually tied closely to the additive gamut of CMYK which create black when more color is added.  The RGB Gamut can create CMYK through these mixtures;

blue (B) + green (G) = cyan (C)

red (R) + blue (B) = magenta (M)

red (R) + green (G)  = yellow (Y)

no lights = black (K)

This was a really wonderful discovery I had, and being a person who deals with the translation from RGB to CMYK quite often I find it fascinating the correlation between the two.  Thought it could be really great to allow others to learn about this through a light that allows you to fade each color of RGB in and out to create every color in the spectrum manually.  The exploration of additive color mixing is not something people consciously deal with on normal day to day basis despite our daily use of the RGB gamut in computer montors and televisions.

Moving forward with this Idea I decided to make two lights one analog which determines the color and brightness based off of the users physical input into levers. The other would be digital, and would react without physically touching the light to react to the users proximity as a way to vary the lights color and brightness. To pursue this I would need the help of a microprocessor, which I could program to run these actions. For the first analog light I thought I could skip the use of the microprocessor, but found that it was very difficult to control the voltage running to the LEDs without a variable voltage resistor (which is expensive, and not programmable) or microprocessor ($30 and programmable). I decided to use a microprocessor called Arduino which is an open source chip with open source software for programming. It is intended for people who wish to do some prototyping without a ton of cost attached, so this was a perfect fit for what I was doing. Arduino also has a very strong following with forums and endless resources to help along the way. Back to the analog light. The light allows the user to control each of the three colors in the RGB gamut to explore these colors on there own. It is intended to be a learning tool as much as a mood setter. The second light would use the Arduino’s ability to respond to inputs and alter the LED’s based on these inputs. In this case I attached a proximity sensor which can detect distance using and infrared LED and receiver to resist the voltage input. Based on the voltage readings the Arduino reads from the sensors output it varies the program which it running to change the color and brightness of the LED’s. In this light I used an LED chip called Octabrite, which is made to work with Arduino, and has eight high output RGB LEDs. These light turn out great and are very elegant in a dark atmosphere. The Analog light was the most successful, due to the ability to directly affect each color manually with sliders. I still have yet to get the digital light’s program exactly how I want it, but I feel I will get it once I work with the Arduino some more.

The development through Transparnet materials, Additive Color, and Micro-processing resulted in two lights which rely on all of thee explorations, and help the user become more aware of the most surprising discovery of additive color mixing and how it bridges the gap between RGB and CMY. The lights create a connection with the user through analog input, or the indirect connection with a proximity sensor. This exploration sent me down paths I would have never expected to follow in the beginning of this project, but I am very happy with the results, and knowledge I gained in the past two months of development.