San Jose, the strange orange lights in your sky are not a UFO or a new year comet. These flashing dots are an art installation located on the hillside above ART-TECH. In the "Millennium River" installation, a thousand ultra bright LEDs are connected to 100 embedded micro controllers and placed 500 feet up the side of a hill. A control panel at the base of the installation allows guests of the ranch to encode patterns that are send to the top of the hill and can then be seen as light patterns running down the LED array.
The "Millennium River" is one half of the L2K project, an art
installation created by Tim Black and crew for the 1999 Burningman festival. The L2K project created a play space out of the big worries of 1999, the year 2000 and embedded computers.
This project installed 2000 lights in a 500 foot diameter ring around the
central figure of the Man. A remote control room (2000 feet away) contained
another 2000 LEDs and 2000 pushbuttons. Data was transmitted from the
control room to the ring at 2000 packets per second. A total of 400
microcontrollers were used in the project. (200 in the control room and 200
buried in the dirt of the desert)
The distributed controllers allow the collection of lights to be connected
to a single long wiring harness. They are run by a set of 6 volt golf cart
batteries.
This project explores the relationship of a person to large and small scale
objects. The control buttons are smaller than a finger tip, but when the
patterns created from the tiny buttons are expressed across the horizon, or
down the side of a hill, it has an interesting effect on the person
observing these connections.
The L2K project and more recent ones are documented at http://www.quantalink.com
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