Photo by David Barron
Marge, Myk Ostrowski and I installed a 10-piece version of “Another Side of In” in the gallery at Boston Children’s Museum. The 3-sided gallery is a perfect space for the exhibit, and a natural fit for the “Art Meets Music” theme for February.
The museum did a fantastic job of designing panels for each piece that utilize their existing hanging system. The panels allowed us route the power cord through the back and to mount the Maxbotix rangefinders from the rear through a hole in the panel below each piece. After covering the sensor with gauze, it becomes almost invisible.
The computer is mounted above a ceiling beam in the upper left of the above photo, and three 4-channel DMX dimmers are spaced evenly about the ceiling and mounted to the beams. The wireless network means that there is no need to run cables to the individual pieces or to the lighting system, so installation is pretty simple.
If you look carefully at the picture to the left, you’ll see the red SparkFun MP3 Trigger board, which is what I use as the looping sound source for each piece. Using a shunt jumper on the first trigger input causes the MP3 Trigger to play the 45-minute track endlessly, and the serial interface is used to send real-time volume updates at a speed which produces smooth gain changes.
The other board interfaces to the rangefinder and calculates the volume based on proximity. It also has a Cypress LS WirelessUSB radio module to communicate with the PC in the ceiling. The main purpose of the wireless network is twofold: First, to synchronize the ultrasonic rangefinder “pings” so there’s no crosstalk, and second, to feed the position information to the PC controlling the lights.
One important change we made during the installation is to set the default light level on each piece to something more than nothing. The original idea was that all pieces would start out “dark” and the light would come up only when someone approached. However, the gallery just looked too spectacular with light on all the pieces to leave it all dark, so I reprogrammed the system so that the minimum light level on each piece is bright enough to create a nice effect, but increases dramatically when you approach each piece. Much better!
Reports from the museum are great. Kids, adults and families are exploring the art in the gallery moreso than with any previous installation.
I am honored to be featured in a SparkFun print ad, running full page in the current issues of Make Magazine, Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts and Servo magazines – truly a collection of geek journals. The media gang from Boulder, Colorado came to Boston during the installation of Another Side of In at Boston Children’s Museum, and shot the photo in my Waltham Mills studio.
