Created by Jamie Zigelbaum and commissioned by Design Miami/ Basel, where the project debuted earlier this year, Triangular Series is a site-specific lighting installation composed of numerous, truncated tetrahedral forms. Each object has an unique form and senses the other and the physiological rhythms of visitors beneath them.

Aliens of a sort, their respiration is a movement of light. Like the cells in our hearts and the clocks on our walls their rhythms affect each other through the process of entrainment. The result is an emergent, undesigned dance of light from the ceiling swarm and triangular projections below.

Each ‘light form’ includes a downward facing RaspberryPi noir camera with an IR led array running of an rPi. On board, software incorporates simple computer vision for blob tracking to know when someone walks directly beneath a light and their velocity. This velocity becomes a parameter in the system and effects the internal respiration setting for that light — the oscillation frequency of their brightness. When a person walks below a light it flashes warm white (from cool which is the default) and sends a radial wave of warmth through its neighbors. Bigger lights send a bigger wave, the largest covers the entire space. A slow walker will slow the respiration, fast will speed it up.

All the lights are controlled by a Mac Pro running a javascript server with each rPi as a client. Velocity and presence data flows to the Mac Pro which runs an entrainment model of the entire system sending frequency targets back to each rPi. When a light is sped up by someone below, this change effects the whole system through entrainment resulting in emerging patterns. If no one is in the space for about 15 minutes, the lights will all fall into a slow synchrony of cool light, their “sleep” state.

The project was made possible with the help of Jon Moeller, Allison Wood, and Jimmy Tran of Midnight Commercial and Yotam Mann. For full project credits, see here.

Project Page | Jamie Zigelbaum