[dramatic music]
- My name is Jen Lewin, and I'm an interactive light artist.
I create interactive sound and LED art
that can be the scale of a landscape.
Humans across the planet love light
and we immediately get interacting with light,
and so I can create a light interaction piece
and everyone participates and plays with it
and understands it.
My largest piece is called Cosmos.
It's over 15,000 square feet and had 240,000 LEDs.
My work has been shown in over 18 countries.
I think The Pool has been to over 15 countries
and hundreds of exhibitions.
The very first Pool was actually an honorarium grant
from Burning Man in 2008.
I built it, I had to bring it back and rebuild it.
And in fact, I think The Pool has been fully
re-engineered and rebuild probably over 10 times
at this point.
There was a lot of learning in creating a work like that,
and as I got better at building the work
and better at implementing my vision,
then the work became more mobile
and was able to travel around the world.
There's been something really magical
about being on the team, moving The Pool around,
and seeing how in all of these really different places
everyone jumps in in place.
And when you kind of get down to the core behavior
of humans and play, everyone plays the same way.
Kids immediately get it.
Adults, you know, hesitate a little bit more.
Everyone takes photos.
But in the end you sort of see this really amazing
connectiveness between all of us
which is what the sculpture is about too.
So to have the sculpture be about that
and then to have it move around the world
and to really see that has been special
At the beginning phase of any project,
there's a long period of time
where I just let ideas percolate.
So I'll spend a lot of time actually flying through the site
and analyzing the site in 3D, kind of step one,
is being able to understand the space.
At that point, then I come up with an idea
and then I don't actually sketch it on paper.
I render it in 3D.
Once we have a three-dimensional model,
I sit down with my team
and we start to figure out how to build it.
It could be up to a year or two year inventive process
of figuring it out,
because it's almost never straight forward.
How are we gonna make it?
What can we do?
And so there's this amazing process
of iteration and invention.
We're building new circuit boards.
We're trying to figure out what the software will be.
We're writing software, we're testing things.
So there's just constant experimentation.
Finally, we come up with a prototype,
we all approve of the prototype.
And then we go into fabrication.
And in most of my works, that means you take the prototype
and you make a thousand of them.
So there's a lot of fabrication.
There's a lot of repetition.
We assemble everything here in the studio.
And then there's a testing phase
where you have to test everything,
the [indistinct] testing of every component,
testing all the LEDs.
You have final assembly,
and then eventually you go to the site
and you bring it all together.
And I think that's the interesting thing about my process.
It's really looking at all of the pieces
and then figuring out how you can bring them all together.
It's not just one or the other.
So it's both the material
how the material is gonna work with the circuit board
and then how the lighting is gonna work within that.
I love it.
I think my favorite days are actually my software days
where I get to sit and write code all day.
I loved computers and programming from a very early age.
I was part of an experimental program,
a really awesome experimental program called Logo,
where I learned to program in third grade.
But I was from a little bit of an earlier generation
where you were supposed to pick,
it was left-brained or right-brained.
So you were supposed to be an artist
or you were supposed to be an engineer.
And I rather stubbornly refused to do that
and just decided I was gonna do both.
This is actually all of the custom software.
that's running the Aurora sculpture in Minneapolis
and I'm looking at video that I've created and composed
and it's actually being mapped to an LED array,
that then is physically in the space.
This is interesting software
because it's also pulling in weather data.
It's looking at live weather and based on weather
it's like creating all these different playlists.
So if there's a weather condition of rain
it will actually play a rain video.
What you're looking at here on this screen
is actually another piece of software
that we built internally
that allows us as to communicate with any of our projects.
And I'm actually communicating with an XP radio.
That's an XP radio, and I can, for example,
set all sorts of parameters,
so I have this curtain downstairs
and if I wanted to
I can actually trigger a stored palette.
I'm looking at a blue palette here
but I could actually compose a new palette right now
that will then get stored onto the work permanently.
So if I left, then the work would actually display that
and use that as sort of a future color.
So I'm really creating like a skeleton structure
for all of these different kinds of lighting conditions.
And then I'm creating an interactive seed.
And then I'm allowing people to play
within those conditions.
Ground-based pieces are really unusual
and different compared to most pieces like this.
There is no single master computer in The Pool or Aqueous
or Cosmos or any of my ground-based pieces.
Many years ago, I made a decision to build these pieces
as mesh networks.
And that was actually an unusual decision at the time.
Now it's much more common because we have
all these smart devices in our home,
early 2000s that was not common.
Each platform is smart.
It has all of this intelligence.
It knows you're standing on it.
It can animate.
And then all of the platforms communicate with each other.
From a code perspective,
it can be really interesting because you actually
are very constrained in what you can do,
but you have to build this sort of very organic system
that is measurable
that allows for this dynamic mesh network to be created.
[upbeat music]
So these are some of the components
that were used in the Aurora,
which is a recent sculpture we installed in Minneapolis.
You're just looking at some of the prototyping.
We had to prototype in aluminum ring forms
so you can see one here that I've actually glued together
to prototype.
The final Aurora is built out of a welded aluminum form.
And this is just a model of one hanging up here.
But in the Aurora are thousands of glass bulbs.
So it's actually looks like a traditional glass bulb.
It's just not wired.
So it doesn't have any kind of incandescent wiring in it.
And then we had this piece made.
This is a custom acrylic piece
that actually was injection molded.
And then we built and designed these really cool LED rings.
And they have a custom injection molded piece on it
in three LEDs.
The system is really interesting
because basically you can attach a glass bulb
and then you can screw on the LED on the back.
And then all of these LEDs can chain together
creating thousands of them,
but still creating this sort of transparent twinkle.
If you look at it, you can sort of see through it.
And clearly this is just a prototype.
So the difference with this prototype
is our boards in the back are actually black
and I didn't want that opacity,
I wanted them to be semi-transparent.
So if you look at the ones that we actually made
they have this really beautiful
more semi-transparent glow to them.
So just examples of a large art piece that requires
many many different components.
To me, there's something so intrinsically interesting
about this element of participation,
bringing people into the work
and allowing them to create this relationship
with the work where it's the work and them,
all of the work has that piece of it at its heart.
That idea of being part of something
and being able to create that connection within public art.
There really aren't that many moments
where we get to play music together collaboratively.
The harps are really designed
with sounds that allow you to run around,
play and actually have this music experience
without necessarily knowing how to play music.
So it really becomes a participatory experience in light,
and see this really beautiful light effect on their hands.
[light melodic music]
This is the guts of one of my newer laser harps.
We have it out here, we're prototyping it.
[harp music]
This harp is using a custom sensor.
What this is doing is actually sending out an infrared beam
and it's triangulating that beam off of my hand
and sending back both distance information
as well as sort of the speed of change.
So all of that information is being sent.
I'm actually triggering it right now.
It's being sent back to a custom controller
that's a little bit away from us.
It's not as simple as just a single note
and you'll hear on several of the notes
that the notes change over time
and that there's like a grace and a breathlessness
to the notes.
So that you're not just triggering a single note.
You feel like you wanna move through the notes,
and find out.
All of my work has an Easter egg in it
which means there's some sort of component
that if you trigger and find, will affect other components.
In the case of my laser harps
there is a laser which we call the magic laser.
And if you trigger that laser you'll change the sound.
So right now you can hear these kind of smooth
and ethereal signs.
But if I hold this particular laser
I know which one it is, I've changed the sounds.
So by holding it for that extended period of time
the sounds have changed.
In my ground-based pieces,
there's usually a magical platform
that when you stand on will change the entire color palette
for the rest of the sculpture.
This is going actually to a playground I build,
what are called Magical Harps
for the Magical Bridge Foundation
which creates accessible playgrounds.
So it goes into a playground
that's really meant to inspire kids of all ability
to be able to play and create music.
The hardest aspect to learn
of all of my work has been the hardware.
There's so much of building hardware
that just comes from a lifetime of building hardware,
and I'm gonna be learning forever.
Over time, the tools have become so much more sophisticated.
So, circuit boards have shrunk in size.
Almost everyone who starts building hardware
starts on breadboards.
This is a breadboard example
of the second laser harp I ever made,
and it's programmed with a pic microcontroller.
It looks like the micro controller actually popped out.
In the end, it only took me a few days to assemble.
It took me months to figure out and learn how to make.
I was just learning electronics,
and so I actually had to really figure out
how everything was gonna work.
I had to do all the math and computation
to understand how the circuit was actually gonna function.
Things change.
This is one of the OG prototypes
for one of the first pool sculptures.
I like to keep it around.
Very scary looking for me
but this is one of the internal pieces.
All of this was hand built
hundreds and hundreds of hour of actually soldering
because we made hundreds of these, all handmade.
And then of course, something like this
has become much more elegant.
I don't have components on this
but much smaller, more elegant boards.
And actually everything you see here
plus probably 10 times as much is done now on this board,
which looks much cleaner.
So this is indicative of
either my temporary or permanent work.
We have a custom circuit board.
That's a wireless networkable component.
There's obviously a power supply.
Right now, we're testing everything
and making sure that it's ready.
We're burning in our LEDs
and keeping them running for several weeks.
Once we know that this is a go,
we'll then go through the process of waterproofing it.
We experimented a lot with coatings.
We've used a lot of different kinds of coatings.
Now we actually pot all of our electronics
which essentially means we fully encase them
in a particular type of resin.
So they're bricked per se in resin.
And then we test them
by actually sitting them in water
or soaking them in water for days.
We've actually had tests where we've had pieces submerged
for a week,
then heating up the water and cooling the water
and dealing with temperature changes
that might also affect something that's wet.
It's no small feat to make a sculpture
with hundreds of electronics that you jump on
and a sculpture that can be rained on and snowed on,
and deal with really, you know, very interactive behavior.
The first time I saw people interact with my work
I had this sort of surprised moment because up to that point
I'd been so caught up and so focused on the technology
and making the technology work,
that I really hadn't stepped back to sort of see
how joyful the pice could be.
I wanted something integrated.
I wanted something kids liked
and grandparents liked and different cultures liked.
I feel inclined to want that and desire that.
And I wanna see pieces in community
that truly engage with community
and community is diverse.
To create public art, to create these places,
and to effect space requires,
I think it requires having the desire
to bring everyone together.
To me, public art at its best can really create
a sense of place.
And a sense of place is really important.
It's how a community aligns with where they live.
It brings in other people, and it really connects,
you know, those living in a place with where they are.
I hope that young people play with technology more
and I wanna see more artists
working within this medium,
artists making dynamic connected high tech,
beautiful artwork.
[dramatic music]