The idea was to leverage the light transmitting properties of clear acrylic sheeting and pass LED light through it; interfering the transmission using laser cut edges which would cause the light to highlight the lines thereby creating a painting with light.
For this task, I wanted to explore the materiality of clear acrylic and the application of coloured light.
I decided to use a photo taken some years ago of a Gecko sitting on a bromeliad out in the garden. I found this to be a striking image due to the swathes of sunlit green strappy leaves with the sharp silhouette of the Gecko perched on the underside centred in the frame... an ideal candidate for tracing.
I then used Adobe Illustrator to create a 4 colour trace of the image, allowing the isolation of each layer of colour used to create a laser cut outline
These were then cut out of sheets of 6mm clear acrylic using large CO2 laser.
I designed a simple finger-jointed box to house the electronics and laser cut this out of 3mm black acrylic sheet.
The electronics used were an Adafruit Trinket Pro 5v microcontroller and a strip of densely packed Dotstar type RGB LEDs. The Trinket allowed me to program the LEDs using the Arduino IDE. The LED strip was cut into 4 lengths then wired together in sequence allowing me to create a physical 2D array while maintaining a logical 1D serial array for ease of programming; which was done to create a continuous slow-moving rainbow effect.
The strips were glued to the underside of the lid of the box structure, and the Trinket was mounted on a mini breadboard with a self adhesive back which I stuck to the bottom surface of the box allowing the micro USB cable to protrude from a small hole cut in the side panel. Power is supplied in this case via a USB cable which has the added benefit of allowing me to reprogram the LED display should I ever wish to.
