How This Woman Makes Mesmerizing Light Sculptures

[dramatic music]

My name is Jen Lewin, and I'm an interactive light artist.

I create interactive sound and LED art

that can be the scale of a landscape.

Humans across the planet love light

and we immediately get interacting with light,

and so I can create a light interaction piece

and everyone participates and plays with it

and understands it.

My largest piece is called Cosmos.

It's over 15,000 square feet and had 240,000 LEDs.

My work has been shown in over 18 countries.

I think The Pool has been to over 15 countries

and hundreds of exhibitions.

The very first Pool was actually an honorarium grant

from Burning Man in 2008.

I built it, I had to bring it back and rebuild it.

And in fact, I think The Pool has been fully

re-engineered and rebuild probably over 10 times

at this point.

There was a lot of learning in creating a work like that,

and as I got better at building the work

and better at implementing my vision,

then the work became more mobile

and was able to travel around the world.

There's been something really magical

about being on the team, moving The Pool around,

and seeing how in all of these really different places

everyone jumps in in place.

And when you kind of get down to the core behavior

of humans and play, everyone plays the same way.

Kids immediately get it.

Adults, you know, hesitate a little bit more.

Everyone takes photos.

But in the end you sort of see this really amazing

connectiveness between all of us

which is what the sculpture is about too.

So to have the sculpture be about that

and then to have it move around the world

and to really see that has been special

At the beginning phase of any project,

there's a long period of time

where I just let ideas percolate.

So I'll spend a lot of time actually flying through the site

and analyzing the site in 3D, kind of step one,

is being able to understand the space.

At that point, then I come up with an idea

and then I don't actually sketch it on paper.

I render it in 3D.

Once we have a three-dimensional model,

I sit down with my team

and we start to figure out how to build it.

It could be up to a year or two year inventive process

of figuring it out,

because it's almost never straight forward.

How are we gonna make it?

What can we do?

And so there's this amazing process

of iteration and invention.

We're building new circuit boards.

We're trying to figure out what the software will be.

We're writing software, we're testing things.

So there's just constant experimentation.

Finally, we come up with a prototype,

we all approve of the prototype.

And then we go into fabrication.

And in most of my works, that means you take the prototype

and you make a thousand of them.

So there's a lot of fabrication.

There's a lot of repetition.

We assemble everything here in the studio.

And then there's a testing phase

where you have to test everything,

the [indistinct] testing of every component,

testing all the LEDs.

You have final assembly,

and then eventually you go to the site

and you bring it all together.

And I think that's the interesting thing about my process.

It's really looking at all of the pieces

and then figuring out how you can bring them all together.

It's not just one or the other.

So it's both the material

how the material is gonna work with the circuit board

and then how the lighting is gonna work within that.

I love it.

I think my favorite days are actually my software days

where I get to sit and write code all day.

I loved computers and programming from a very early age.

I was part of an experimental program,

a really awesome experimental program called Logo,

where I learned to program in third grade.

But I was from a little bit of an earlier generation

where you were supposed to pick,

it was left-brained or right-brained.

So you were supposed to be an artist

or you were supposed to be an engineer.

And I rather stubbornly refused to do that

and just decided I was gonna do both.

This is actually all of the custom software.

that's running the Aurora sculpture in Minneapolis

and I'm looking at video that I've created and composed

and it's actually being mapped to an LED array,

that then is physically in the space.

This is interesting software

because it's also pulling in weather data.

It's looking at live weather and based on weather

it's like creating all these different playlists.

So if there's a weather condition of rain

it will actually play a rain video.

What you're looking at here on this screen

is actually another piece of software

that we built internally

that allows us as to communicate with any of our projects.

And I'm actually communicating with an XP radio.

That's an XP radio, and I can, for example,

set all sorts of parameters,

so I have this curtain downstairs

and if I wanted to

I can actually trigger a stored palette.

I'm looking at a blue palette here

but I could actually compose a new palette right now

that will then get stored onto the work permanently.

So if I left, then the work would actually display that

and use that as sort of a future color.

So I'm really creating like a skeleton structure

for all of these different kinds of lighting conditions.

And then I'm creating an interactive seed.

And then I'm allowing people to play

within those conditions.

Ground-based pieces are really unusual

and different compared to most pieces like this.

There is no single master computer in The Pool or Aqueous

or Cosmos or any of my ground-based pieces.

Many years ago, I made a decision to build these pieces

as mesh networks.

And that was actually an unusual decision at the time.

Now it's much more common because we have

all these smart devices in our home,

early 2000s that was not common.

Each platform is smart.

It has all of this intelligence.

It knows you're standing on it.

It can animate.

And then all of the platforms communicate with each other.

From a code perspective,

it can be really interesting because you actually

are very constrained in what you can do,

but you have to build this sort of very organic system

that is measurable

that allows for this dynamic mesh network to be created.

[upbeat music]

So these are some of the components

that were used in the Aurora,

which is a recent sculpture we installed in Minneapolis.

You're just looking at some of the prototyping.

We had to prototype in aluminum ring forms

so you can see one here that I've actually glued together

to prototype.

The final Aurora is built out of a welded aluminum form.

And this is just a model of one hanging up here.

But in the Aurora are thousands of glass bulbs.

So it's actually looks like a traditional glass bulb.

It's just not wired.

So it doesn't have any kind of incandescent wiring in it.

And then we had this piece made.

This is a custom acrylic piece

that actually was injection molded.

And then we built and designed these really cool LED rings.

And they have a custom injection molded piece on it

in three LEDs.

The system is really interesting

because basically you can attach a glass bulb

and then you can screw on the LED on the back.

And then all of these LEDs can chain together

creating thousands of them,

but still creating this sort of transparent twinkle.

If you look at it, you can sort of see through it.

And clearly this is just a prototype.

So the difference with this prototype

is our boards in the back are actually black

and I didn't want that opacity,

I wanted them to be semi-transparent.

So if you look at the ones that we actually made

they have this really beautiful

more semi-transparent glow to them.

So just examples of a large art piece that requires

many many different components.

To me, there's something so intrinsically interesting

about this element of participation,

bringing people into the work

and allowing them to create this relationship

with the work where it's the work and them,

all of the work has that piece of it at its heart.

That idea of being part of something

and being able to create that connection within public art.

There really aren't that many moments

where we get to play music together collaboratively.

The harps are really designed

with sounds that allow you to run around,

play and actually have this music experience

without necessarily knowing how to play music.

So it really becomes a participatory experience in light,

and see this really beautiful light effect on their hands.

[light melodic music]

This is the guts of one of my newer laser harps.

We have it out here, we're prototyping it.

[harp music]

This harp is using a custom sensor.

What this is doing is actually sending out an infrared beam

and it's triangulating that beam off of my hand

and sending back both distance information

as well as sort of the speed of change.

So all of that information is being sent.

I'm actually triggering it right now.

It's being sent back to a custom controller

that's a little bit away from us.

It's not as simple as just a single note

and you'll hear on several of the notes

that the notes change over time

and that there's like a grace and a breathlessness

to the notes.

So that you're not just triggering a single note.

You feel like you wanna move through the notes,

and find out.

All of my work has an Easter egg in it

which means there's some sort of component

that if you trigger and find, will affect other components.

In the case of my laser harps

there is a laser which we call the magic laser.

And if you trigger that laser you'll change the sound.

So right now you can hear these kind of smooth

and ethereal signs.

But if I hold this particular laser

I know which one it is, I've changed the sounds.

So by holding it for that extended period of time

the sounds have changed.

In my ground-based pieces,

there's usually a magical platform

that when you stand on will change the entire color palette

for the rest of the sculpture.

This is going actually to a playground I build,

what are called Magical Harps

for the Magical Bridge Foundation

which creates accessible playgrounds.

So it goes into a playground

that's really meant to inspire kids of all ability

to be able to play and create music.

The hardest aspect to learn

of all of my work has been the hardware.

There's so much of building hardware

that just comes from a lifetime of building hardware,

and I'm gonna be learning forever.

Over time, the tools have become so much more sophisticated.

So, circuit boards have shrunk in size.

Almost everyone who starts building hardware

starts on breadboards.

This is a breadboard example

of the second laser harp I ever made,

and it's programmed with a pic microcontroller.

It looks like the micro controller actually popped out.

In the end, it only took me a few days to assemble.

It took me months to figure out and learn how to make.

I was just learning electronics,

and so I actually had to really figure out

how everything was gonna work.

I had to do all the math and computation

to understand how the circuit was actually gonna function.

Things change.

This is one of the OG prototypes

for one of the first pool sculptures.

I like to keep it around.

Very scary looking for me

but this is one of the internal pieces.

All of this was hand built

hundreds and hundreds of hour of actually soldering

because we made hundreds of these, all handmade.

And then of course, something like this

has become much more elegant.

I don't have components on this

but much smaller, more elegant boards.

And actually everything you see here

plus probably 10 times as much is done now on this board,

which looks much cleaner.

So this is indicative of

either my temporary or permanent work.

We have a custom circuit board.

That's a wireless networkable component.

There's obviously a power supply.

Right now, we're testing everything

and making sure that it's ready.

We're burning in our LEDs

and keeping them running for several weeks.

Once we know that this is a go,

we'll then go through the process of waterproofing it.

We experimented a lot with coatings.

We've used a lot of different kinds of coatings.

Now we actually pot all of our electronics

which essentially means we fully encase them

in a particular type of resin.

So they're bricked per se in resin.

And then we test them

by actually sitting them in water

or soaking them in water for days.

We've actually had tests where we've had pieces submerged

for a week,

then heating up the water and cooling the water

and dealing with temperature changes

that might also affect something that's wet.

It's no small feat to make a sculpture

with hundreds of electronics that you jump on

and a sculpture that can be rained on and snowed on,

and deal with really, you know, very interactive behavior.

The first time I saw people interact with my work

I had this sort of surprised moment because up to that point

I'd been so caught up and so focused on the technology

and making the technology work,

that I really hadn't stepped back to sort of see

how joyful the pice could be.

I wanted something integrated.

I wanted something kids liked

and grandparents liked and different cultures liked.

I feel inclined to want that and desire that.

And I wanna see pieces in community

that truly engage with community

and community is diverse.

To create public art, to create these places,

and to effect space requires,

I think it requires having the desire

to bring everyone together.

To me, public art at its best can really create

a sense of place.

And a sense of place is really important.

It's how a community aligns with where they live.

It brings in other people, and it really connects,

you know, those living in a place with where they are.

I hope that young people play with technology more

and I wanna see more artists

working within this medium,

artists making dynamic connected high tech,

beautiful artwork.

[dramatic music]