technology
A warped fresnel lens placed over a chainlink fence.
Fresnel Lens
Field lens/fresnel screen “brighteners” are often used to redirect the backlight LEDs behind televisions, eliminating the “hot spot” often observed in such screens, by brightening the edges of the display. We dismantle unrepairable televisions to source our fresnel lenses (along with metal, wires, speakers and other salvageable components) and use them to shape natural and artificial light.
LED strips partly covered by a fresnel lens.
LED Pixels
We primarily use SK6812 RGBW LEDs in our work. The SK6812 LED is an intelligently controlled light source, which integrates the control circuit and RGBW chip into a 5050 component package. This allows for each LED in a circuit to be controlled independently of one another, to display a range of colours and animations.
ESP-32 mounted inside an enclosure featuring a rotary encoder.
Control
For our large scale projects we use Jitter, the visual programming component of Cycling 74’s Max 8 software, to create audio-responsive and evolving installations.
For our small scale “computer free” pieces we use the low-cost, low-power ESP32 micro-controller. This unit is programmed using custom code, uploaded through the Arduino IDE software. Our code makes use of the neopixelbus library, as well as the FastLED library for its simplex noise algorithm.
