L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Is that a glowstick in your pocket?

October 4, 2008 on 9:52 pm | In Arts, General Musing |

Last week I was alerted to the existence of a fabulous thing: strings of tiny purple lights on sale at the Fred Meyer Halloween display. They’re about 5 feet long and run for hours on two AA batteries. I popped right over and bought one. I had no idea at all what on earth I would use it for but how could I resist? They even have a blink setting. You really never know when you might need something like that. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

This weekend is the Redmond Digital Arts Festival. You can find out all about it on the festival website so I won’t go into the details here other than to say we’re off to a great start and you all should come to Redmond when we do it again next year. Seriously.

I was slated to work all day in the digital lounge - a large dark room with a number fascinating interactive installations and, sadly, Rock Band 2 on a 14-ft wide screen. Fortunately the 80s rock covers that were drummed into my head all afternoon were hammered out by the pounding techno DJ later in the evening.

Anyhoo, knowing I was going to be working in a dark room, I decided to make a sort of blinking purple tiara out of the light string. It worked great, but that wasn’t the half of it…

One of the most popular activities was an interactive light show created by Seattle artist Amir Stone. An infrared camera picked up lightsources - mostly glowsticks, though any source would do - and projected persistent images of the movements onto two 14′x10′ screens. The screen cleared for a new artistic endeavor every 60 seconds. It turns out that a purple light tiara makes fabulous noodly streaks of color on the screen - a terrific contrast to the broader glowstick paths.

It was all squiggles and swooshes until we discovered that a camera flash would capture a still image of the people in line of the projector. That’s me below (and my tiara squiggles all over the middle).

Nine hours of it was about enough though.

See more like that one:

• If a Song Falls in the Forest
• Art or Crap?
• The Sunday Six: Weird This Week
• Bad-ass Bikers vs. Bad-ass Knitters
• It all looked like junk