I designed the lighting controller and software for Phoenix’s signature art piece “Her Secret is Patience”, which was just dedicated last Thursday. Here are a few photos I took, and some links to articles about the sculpture.
Are those nets or fabric? Does it move in the wind? It looks really neat, especially at night. How hard was it to get the light right and are those different colored lights at night or is the fabric that color?
The sculpture is made from a specially woven netting. There were numerous issues that delayed the installation - some of my links may discuss them. The netting is different colors, but the lights really isolate it against the dark sky - I think it’s much more impressive at night. There is a lighting designer who’s going to create different “scenes” that my controller will sequence through over the year. It remains to be seen how dramatically different the lights make the sculpture appear.
I work for a small (very small) company that makes lighting controllers, primarily for city parks - we allow cities and schools to remotely schedule and control their ballfield lights. I designed the hardware and embedded software for these systems. Somehow, the engineer involved with the art project knew about us, and asked if we could design the controller of the piece - I guess that there wasn’t anything off-the-shelf that fit their budget. I modified one of our standard units, adding twice the number of outputs, and then wrote some code to sequence the lights. So far, everyone seems happy…
It’s a cool thing to be involved with, although I don’t think we made much profit.
