Category: Arduino

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Jacked: Panthera Atrox

Another collaboration with Cynthia Minet. Jacked: Panthera Atrox is the latest of her incredible animal creations built from reclaimed plastic and this time animated with a similar mechanism to a pump jack used to push oil out of the ground. The lioness’ head tilts up and down with the rhythmic movement of the pump arm.

A photo of a sculpture made of reclaimed plastics and LED lights. It's a representation of an extinct lion, Panthera Atrox. The photo shows it on display in the window of the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles.
Panthera Atrox on display at the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles

I worked with Cynthia to install the LED lighting throughout the sculpture and programmed the colors using an Arduino and the FastLED library. This allowed us to tune each individual LED to the color based on the light’s location within the sculpture.

Jacked was on exhibit at the Craft Contemporary and stood in the window opposite the La Brea tar pits.

3D printed skulls lit from below with projected, animated text beside them

In addition to the Panthera Atrox Cynthia had printed three skulls of animals that have been lost to extinction. We installed mini projectors above the skulls and I animated the text displayed by each skull to slowly disintegrate in After Effects. The text is from Charles Harper Webb’s poem, “The Animals are Leaving”.

For more information on the installation visit Cynthia’s Jacked: Panthera Atrox page.

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Collaboration

It’s been quiet in my creative world…but not uneventful. Over the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cynthia Minet on her upcoming installation, “Migrations.” Cynthia is an accomplished artist and her creations are constructed from post-consumer plastics and LED lighting. Migrations depicts six Roseate Spoonbills in varying stages of flight. With this sculpture Cynthia hoped to push the lighting a little further than she had in previous work.

There were two goals.

  1. Have greater control over the color and brightness of each LED
  2. Add movement to the sculpture by animating the LEDs
A closeup of an LED behind a magnifying glass with its wires splayed out as I do my best to connect it to another strand of LEDs.

After some initial conversation a third goal popped up. If we’re going to be programming these LEDs could we also add some motion activated audio to immerse the viewer in the world of the spoonbill?

After some testing we settled on the P9813 LED pixels. The plastic casing around the actual LED helps diffuse the light. The fact that the strands run at 5v was an added bonus. 

To program the lights and the motion based audio I knew we were going to use something in the Arduino family. The spoonbills do not have a ton of room inside of them so we opted for a Trinket to run the lighting and a Trinket Pro to run the audio system. Ideally everything would run off of one board but that just wasn’t feasible here. This also cut down on the cost for each sculpture. 

The next few posts will get into the details of the wiring, programming, testing, and installation of the lighting and audio systems. 

If you’re around this weekend (Oct 21 and 22) you can see the sculpture in its current state at the Brewery Art Walk. Art Walk runs from 11a-6p both days.