Ether quills

Two Quills combined with The Undergrowth, Entheos Gathering, 2023 Helsinki

The Ether Quills are six peacock feathers in the form of yellow and purple LED panels.

My technique keeps advancing. Now, all the bolts and spacers holding everything together have been standardized and tweaked far better than in the first iterations. Instead of trying to hide the bolts by coloring them or sinking them into the pieces, the bolts have been brought forth, where they glisten at the viewer up front and center.

In the dark of the night, the round chromed heads of the bolts shine like lights of their own.

Also, the controller scheme has been revamped. The panels are now fed a special 3-pin wire that provides the panels with 12v and data from the controller. Everything in the new panels is now wired to minimize any latency and dropped frames for dealing with large festival stages.

Two Quills at my workshop

Quills combined with other stage parts I’ve designed, the Zxyplt’s head and shoulders. More about Zxyplt’s background can be found at KIVA’s website.

Aamu UG 10v Anniversary party main stage, October 2023, Aitoon Honkala

Wishflower

Wishflower is an interactive wooden sculpture and lightshow.

Wishflower is a thought sensing magical sculpture that senses the viewers wishes and shows them the colors of their mind. Three dark wooden water-cut hexagons, 447 LEDs, four Raspberry Pis, an Arduino, some rumble motors and temperature, humidity and conductivity sensors. And a touch reactive fluorescent orange deer’s skull.

The Concept

Conceptually, I wanted a pretty wishing well that wouldn’t need coins or valuables as payment – only your personal touch. You put your hand on the skull, close your eyes and think of something you want deep in your heart. The skull’s sensors see your skin conductivity, temperature and humidity and the motors inside the skull start vibrating to let you know it’s thinking.

The vibration gets louder and more intense – and when the skull’s analysis is ready the altar’s tree root horns flash in different colors and your inner thoughts are translated as a play of colors on the hexagons.

Also, technically there were a couple of things I wanted to achieve:

I wanted to be able to separate the hexagons into individual standalone pieces if needed. Thus, all are self-contained with their own processors, either controlled by a central server or running on an automatic sound reactive program.
I wanted the whole thing to be able to be easily assembled and setup.
I wanted everything to be weatherproof. The first installation was outdoors in Finland on Kosmos Festival 2016, so I knew rain was very likely. All the LEDs are plastic shelled and epoxy dipped, the wooden parts were treated to be waterproof and all the seams were silicone coated to prevent water from leaking in.

Technical details:

Hexagon flower:

Hardware: Each of the wooden hexagons has 149 WS2801 IP68 5v LEDs, a 10A power supply and a Raspberry Pi 3. I put a separate Raspberry Pi into each of the hexagons because I wanted to be able to use them as standalone devices separately. Only a regular power cable goes to each of the hexagons. Raspberry Pi 3 is wifi-enabled, so I can configure and run the software on the hexagons completely wirelessly.

The front face of the hexagons is 6.5mm birch plywood, water jet cut to vector graphics I drew on Adobe Illustrator and converted to .dxf for laser / water cutting. Laser cutting the wood would have burnt the edges dark, so I water cut the hexagons to leave the five beautiful layers of plywood visible from the sides. The wood was treated with dark brown wood oil to make it more weather resistant and to bring out the wood grain and any natural imperfections. At first I studied different kinds of diffusion films for the lights, but decided it’s best to let the light reflect naturally off the wooden backplate inside the hexagons. All the LEDs are hidden behind the front face, so no LEDs are actually visible to viewers – only the glow from behind the water cut wooden pattern.

Software: The program on the Raspberry Pi that runs the LEDs was written from scratch by me in Python. It listens to TCP commands from the deer skull server and controls the LEDs via SPI. The program reads specially rendered 128px * 128px video files and blends them frame by frame to the LED colors, and also mixes in so called “blooms” controlled by the skull’s sensors’ parameters. No two touches, and thus no two wishes are identical.

Skull server and sensors:

All the hardware was installed into a real deer’s skull (no deer were harmed for this installation). It was an old, dried up skull found in the forest that I repurposed for this installation. Only a little bit of drilling & sawing was needed to make the insides big enough for the electronics. The skull acted as a natural waterproof housing for the “brain” of the installation. The altar the skull was on was shaped like a large skull itself – made from green spruce branches and upturned tree roots with two strips of waterproof WS2812B LED strips running inside them.

Inside the painted fluorescent orange skull is a Raspberry Pi and connected to it, an Arduino Nano with some sensors (a very simple custom electrodermal activity sensor and a DHT11) and two Xbox 360 rumble motors glued inside it. Temperature, humidity and skin conductivity sensors tell the Arduino the wisher’s personal profile. The Arduino is connected through USB serial interface to the “brain” Raspberry Pi, which controls the hexagons through WLAN.

This might seem unnecessarily complex: It’s because most of my installations get a few iterations, and I wanted to make this thing as modular as possible from the start.

The Wishflower can also be found on The Finnish Light Art Society’s curated catalogue of Best Light Art of Finland:
https://blaf.fi/art/wishflower/

Eye of the Beholder

The Eye of the Beholder is a modular video installation.

Sacred geometry can be found everywhere in nature. You might have, at times, picked up a romanesco cabbage at the grocery store or marveled at the fractal-like structure of an aloe vera plant from the flower shop, feeling captivated by how it extends deeper into smaller copies of itself.

Perhaps you've wondered at the antlers of a deer or the veins of tree leaves, organized in a seemingly complex yet almost self-evidently natural way.

This piece is part of my ongoing exploration at the intersection of natural materials, sacred geometry, and digital light art.

High technology blends seamlessly with wooden surfaces. Natural forms take on a more magical quality, and the enchantment of technology, in turn, feels more natural. When all visible parts are from nature, it becomes easier to forget about the processors, transmitters, color LEDs, and other electronic components that inevitably make up my works. When wood conceals technology, it's easier to interpret the color variations as reflections of water or fire or as shadows of trees swaying in the wind.

Sometimes my works interact with the audience. Sometimes they may pulsate to the rhythm of music.

These pieces don't care about their viewers any more than a fireplace cares about the person sitting by it or a shoreline cares about someone wading in the water.

You can't do anything to change these lights, and you don't have to. Take a moment to relax and let your thoughts settle.

Behind the curtain:

The piece consists of 4 separate panels. The panels are constructed from three 4mm birch plywood panels and 2 6mm plywood filler layers. Each piece contains a WiFi-enabled microcontroller (ESP8266) and 148 WS2811 LEDs. The panels are controlled through WiFi via Art-Net protocol.

The panels can be arranged to display one large video image divided to the four panels or anything in between.

I’ve presented the panels sometimes together in the above arrangement, and sometimes I’ve had the panels far from each other, hung from the ceiling. Their placement is very open and free due to the lightweight construction and the WiFi data transmission:

WillaZukka Family Gathering, 2019, Turku UG

Video projections by the amazing Astral Projector and Flowers of Life ❤️

Eye of the Beholder @ Projio Light Festival 2020, Tampere

doomsday clock

The Doomsday Clock is an interactive installation that analyzes the language used in news around the world.

A ticking room-sized hub of information, updating in real time. Continuously reading and analyzing the latest news in the world, the clock shows how positive or negative the discourse is currently. Features history graphs for several timelines, “current mood” of the world, constantly updating word clouds of the most used words in certain news categories and a clock face with hands for different metrics. Chilled and relaxing at best, ominous and looming at worst, this installation is interactive – but on a global scale.

1. Server gathers the latest news from rss feeds

Every minute, the external server reads through 26 different english news feeds and aggregators from around the world. These feeds have been picked to maximize global reach and variety.

2. the News are saved to a database

After downloading the news, the server chops up, categorizes and saves all of the relevant information into a database. Data includes news headline and body text, publishing time & date, original source and URL. News category and keywords are extracted from the text.

3. Deep text analysis

The data is sent to IBM’s Watson service (it used to be called Alchemy API). The service performs sentiment analysis on the news title, body and extracted keywords. This analysis gives numeric values to the optimism and pessimism of the text. In essence, the AI tries to figure out how positive or negative the sentiment is in the news.

4. Additional processing of data

After this, the Clock itself performs some additional adjustments on the latest data. Some weighting is done to normalize the data – for example, sports news usually contain exceptionally aggressive words compared to other news. Also, some sources are weighted a bit differently to keep a more neutral, globalized world view.

5. Clock scenes are updated

Different scenes run continuously on the displays. Realtime updating graphs of average sentiment in the world for the last 24h/7d/30d, slowly forming word clouds for words that appear most often in negative / positive news, slowly turning clock hands that graphically display the current situation.

6. The room breathes

A deep heartbeat and the lights in the room pulse accordingly to the current general ‘feeling’ in the world. Lights change color from mellow green to a burning red depending on the average sentiment in the last 15 minutes.

First iteration in Lappeenranta. Featured a wall of LCD monitors showing different scenes, heartbeat sound effect with a subwoofer and reactive PAR led-lights.

Second iteration was a tiny version in a shop window at the Yläkaupungin Yö – city festival 16th of May 2015. It made several upgrades to the server jobs as well as a heavy graphical revamp.

The Concept

The Doomsday Clock is a part of my ongoing research & art project trilogy “Soul Equivalent”. In this project I dive into the soul and essence of humanity’s hive mind, or the soul of human. The first part of the exhibition was opened on 10th on November, 2014.

Conceptually, I wanted the installation to live with the exhibition visitors and to feel like a central hub of the world – and I think I succeeded rather well. Updating each minute, newest news headlines run through the tickers on the screens and the graphs live with what’s going on currently. Big accidents and tragedies are quickly reported on the world stage. Smaller news outlets parrot the news, often using more extreme language, creating a cumulative effect. A bomb going off on the other side of the world can make the graphs and tickers drop drastically to red in a matter of minutes – enabling the exhibition viewers to see how fast bad news travel across the world.

Technical tidbits

The server is a CentOS 6 VPS machine that runs a cron PHP script every minute. The script scrapes RSS feeds, processes the HTML data to a usable form and splits it to a MySQL table. The script analyzes the data using IBM’s Watson API and does some extra processing on the results to produce an even, global score for the current state of the world.

The client that displays the clock has been coded with Processing & Java. It uses pre-generated graphics drawn with Photoshop and Illustrator in addition to generative data-influenced graphics. Some extra visual spice is added with a couple of GL shaders. Outputs up to 4K video for widescreen monitors. Output is easily customized for several monitors.

The client also plays quiet looping generative music and controls the room lighting (LED PAR lights) through an ENTTEC DMX USB Pro Mk2 interface. Pretty much anything DMX-controllable can be setup to react to the clock’s status.