Visual-light installations – ‘Beacon’

Here we show how data from one domain (i.e. literature) can be transformed into artifacts in other domains (i.e. light pattern) .

Transformation of the chapter ‘Awakening’ from my book ‘Melodies of Creation’ to modulated light patterns.

Mapping scheme used: (characters to LEDs), done on a 64 RGB LED display (an extract from the Arduino C code file):

Of course, there are as many different other mapping schemes as there are stars in this Universe – this being just one of them.

Transformation flow:

1. Convert the Word document containing the book, i.e. the chapter ‘Awakening’ into an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text and save it in a .txt file.

2. Using a simple GUI-based programme written in Java, read-in the newly created .txt file and send it over a serial RS232 link to an Arduino UNO board for further processing and display.

                                   Java GUI code                                                                                               Java GUI (above) with an Arduino terminal (below)

3. Using an Arduino UNO based hardware, process the received character and map it to a corresponding position on the 64 RGB LEDs matrix. Indicate all characters that are above 63 (dec) value with a change of colour on LED 1. Thus we can cover upto 124 characters with this mapping scheme.

                                 Arduino UNO board                                                                                     C-code to receive and map incoming chars onto a light pattern

4. A character is mapped onto an existing FastLED library pattern being played in the background as a bright blue LED blip.

5. Sample of the visual-light installation 'Beacon' in mp4 format - link.

Page updated in August 2021