Colour Chamber at Night Lights 2017
At the end of June I exhibited a light and mirror installation as part of the Matiriki festival at MOTAT. It was one of my more ambitious works for the year, constructed of 20 fully rotatable mirror panels with adjustable LED strips.
The idea was to create an interactive environment for people to blend a range of colours together through reflective surfaces. Each panel has a mirror surface with an LED strip attached vertically. They can be rotated to face different surfaces and with an adjustable rotary on the back people can switch between all possible colours on the LED strip. The mirror panels, along with a 1m round mirror base and two-way mirror film, gave the illusion of a bottomless pit.
The project involved an overwhelmingly large amount of different materials and complexity to allow for such interactions to take place. The wiring alone included five lines for the rotary and three for the LED strip per panel. Each panel would need to be connected to a microcontroller which would also require its own power. I used a switcher power supply, outputting up to 40 amps at 5 volts for all the LED strips. The panels were made out of laser cut MDF, each having to be exactly the right size to generate the closed off icosagon shape while also being capable of rotating 350 degrees. The panel would rotate around a DAL tube at its center. This tube was cut to allow the rotary wires to fit around it and underneath the chamber where the power and microcontrollers were.
The exhibition went for three days and is now in the process for continuing into other venues. Before then it will be refined to sustain longer exposures to the publi