The former warehouse (home to a construction firm) that now serves as the Foundation’s headquarters has a relatively narrow but quite tall staircase opening between floors of the office portion of the building. Erwin Redl initially installed a small work in the upper corner of the second floor, but during that visit it became clear that his particular work with LED’s would lend itself well to a site-specific installation filling the stairwell, which was otherwise a difficult space in which to hang artworks both because of its smaller width and its height. So he designed and installed an electrified grid on which myriad LED’s are mounted, with each LED bulb attached to a microchip programmed with an algorithm that randomizes the light both as to intensity and frequency and named it “Michael’s Matrix.” The governing design was set forth in an email from the artist as follows:
Michael,
Proposal sans grid attached.
The lights will NOT fade to zero and then fade back in. They are “shimmering” not “fading in and out”.
The simplicity of the algorithm controlling the light level of every individual LED is quite beautiful:
– choose random brightness value between 50% and 100%
– fade previous brightness value to chosen random value in increments of 10%
– repeat
Erwin
Because each bulb thus brightens or dims at differing rates from each other bulb, the entire effect is a non-repeating series of lights that can recall a starlit sky. Visitors are cautioned not to touch the grid, as the wires to which the LED’s are attached remain exposed. It’s powered at a relatively low voltage, so it’s non-lethal, but (speaking from experience…) you do know that you’ve touched something you shouldn’t touch. It thus gives new meaning to the common warning “don’t touch the artwork.”
