Work / Software and hardware for light installations, including work for Studio Waldemeyer and earlier museum exhibits.Light & interactive installations
Context
Most of my freelance light and interactive installation work was made for Studio Waldemeyer, Moritz Waldemeyer's studio. I worked on the software, LED mapping and hardware that brought the studio's designs into a working installation.
This page also includes independent projects from my freelance years. My earlier museum work in Linz has its own Ars Electronica case study.
Some of the pieces: Stella Rinascente (Rome, 2017), a Christmas facade installation for Rinascente's flagship store by Studio Waldemeyer with Slamp; Journey of Colour, where a camera reads an object's colour palette and projects it onto a light sculpture, also for Studio Waldemeyer; TheOther, a particle-projection piece on emerging cosmology theories shown at the Havana Biennial 2015; and re.show, a dance-theatre premiere for the kontrastmoment agency's 15th anniversary. Alongside these I built LED-mapping tools for the designer Moritz Waldemeyer (LedMapper, WinchesLightPainting) and software for Ingo Maurer's Light + Building 2018 installation.
The problem
Installations may run unattended for weeks. Visitors can touch, lean on or unplug equipment, so the software needs to recover from interruptions without a technician. It also has to handle camera failures and calibrate for the room's lighting, using hardware that may have been specified before the piece was fully defined.
A brief might start as a mood board. At the venue, the physical installation has to be mapped, aligned and tuned, sometimes with only minutes before the doors open.
What I did
- Built the interactive and computer-vision software (C++, Python, OpenGL, OpenCV) and the hardware that drove it.
- Developed production software for permanent exhibitions that needed to run without manual restarts.
- Wrote the LED-mapping and calibration tooling that mapped 3D models onto physical light objects and exported them to the lighting hardware.
- Handled delivery end to end, from an ambiguous brief to a tuned, running piece.
Stack & notes
C++ · Python · OpenGL · OpenCV · openFrameworks · DMX.
Related repositories: LaRinascente, TheJourneyOfColor, LedMapper, IngoLedMapper, IngoLightAndBuilding, WinchesLightPainting, CoralSoul, TheOther, Equalizer, ofxDmx4All.