Lighting Design
Scenic
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Property MasterProjection Design
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎King Creativity Project
Trevor Stoneburner & Ramish Nadeem
2019
Abstract
The project is a wall of 1,250 LEDs that represent a complex amount of economic data in an artistic, colorful, dynamic, and visually striking way. The project will analyze economic data sorted by sector of the global economy to show the interconnectedness of the economy and the dynamic communication of information globally. This project combines technical theatre, economic theory, econometric analysis, and potentially nonlinear dynamics to create a piece of art that requires skills from diverse areas of study and ideally updates in real time. The wall will be controlled by an Arduino Mega that utilizes code developed by us based on data that we analyze and process through the Mathematica program. The code will control the array of lights and change in color and intensity to represent the changes in the economy and communication of information across sectors. It will be a large, striking, dynamic, and colorful item that will be visually pleasing, intellectually informative, and encourages people to engage with the display and recognize the importance and complexity of global markets.
Timeline
- October - Order supplies including lighting equipment and software.
- November - Learn the software and begin writing code that will run the wall as we learn about the capabilities the software has and patterns the data reveals. Create a design of the wall the will work with our capabilities.
- December - Begin construction of wall and drill holes that will be necessary for the modules.
- January - Continue construction of the wall, begin troubleshooting code, and testing capabilities.
- February - Complete construction of the wall and continue writing code that works with the analyzed data.
- March - Complete code for the wall and have it fully functioning.
- April - Prepare for presentations and compile documentation to present.
Creativity Statement
This project is creative and innovative in its combination of two subject areas that are sparingly put in conversation together to create an interesting, engaging, and dynamic display that updates in real time. Our project reflects a novel approach that shows data both usefully and artistically. This will allow data and analysis that is typically limited to a small subset of analysts to be apprehended and appreciated by those who do not typically engage with economics. The wall will be a large, striking, dynamic, and colorful item that will be difficult to ignore and will encourage people to engage with complicated and beautiful data that is otherwise hidden from view. This is unlike what we are able to do in the general Southwestern community because it involves different hardware and software than what we have access to as students in our respective fields. We were drawn towards this project because we felt that it would be new and exciting to try, a challenge to overcome, and a way to impart the beauty of the complex interplay between the local, communal, and global.
Project Description
Economies can be rough places. Billions of individual humans work in concert, organizing into still billions of individual decision making units that fluidly and dynamically change. A household browses Amazon for toilet paper, a seamstress leaves her village in Bangladesh to work in the city, anarchists give tours of Freetown Christiania, a professor at a small liberal arts college in Central Texas grabs a candy bar from a vending machine before yet another lecture. Each of these individual ripples interacts, harmonizes, disrupts, or amplifies other ripples. Some coalesce into waves, others tsunamis. We rely on this system to function well enough and often more than imperfectly. In order to do so, each of these data points is somehow communicated individually, communally, regionally, and globally. The richness of this data set is typically reduced down to a single price for our own purposes or to a flurry of statistics for a proprietary algorithm at a bank to sort through. We would like to stop for a minute and appreciate the aesthetic beauty in the ebb, flow, play, and interaction of this ocean of data.
Ramish Nadeem and Trevor Stoneburner would like to propose a project that combines lighting technology, economic modeling, and computational tools towards exploring new ways of data visualization. We would like to create a wall with a design of LEDs that display the aesthetic beauty, interconnectedness, and complex patterns at play within the global economy. For this project, the interactions between growth in a particular sector and growth in other sectors or the economy as a whole would be modeled spatially. From our current understanding of the data, we feel it would be best to organize economic sectors into different sections of the wall display. Changes in color would indicate positive or negative momentum of the index, along with magnitude of those momentum signals, while changes in intensity would display changes in actual value. We propose 1,250 LED’s branching out from different ‘hubs’ that represent sectors in the economy (e.g. energy, housing, retail, East Asia, Emerging Markets) and spread out into the other sectors to show the complex interactions of different sectors.
Economies can be rough places. Benoit Mandelbrot once said that, “Nobody will deny there is roughness everywhere…” However, it was Mandelbrot’s obsession with the order and complexity hidden in the roughness that yielded the beauty of the Mandelbrot set and the mathematics of fractals broadly. Towards similar ends of enjoying the beauty in modeling, our project would allow viewers to visualize the transmission of economic information across sectors and the globe, to understand the complexity of how signals are amplified or damped in ways that are dependent on the particular nature of interaction of the specific sectors, and, ultimately, to revel in the baroque and cacophonous aesthetic beauty of our global economy.
Methodology
For this project we will be using the Arduino Mega with Wi-Fi module as the computer running the wall from the code that we create. Arduino is the best option for this project as it is designed for DIY makers and has a long history of being used for LED projects with multiple help guides and existing code that other people have developed. The wall will be made of lightweight wood with holes drilled in for the LED modules that are wired behind the wall. The code that we develop will run on the Arduino using the data that is gathered and analyzed by the Mathematica program through standard tools of econometrics, statistical regression, and modeling of nonlinear dynamics.
Assessment
The project will be assessed by our ability to represent the data on the wall. If we are able to achieve everything that we set out to do, we will have an artful way to display complex amounts of data. Markers that will show completion are the scale of the wall and it it utilizes the full 1,250 LEDs that we set out to use, another maker will be the amount of data that we are able to analyze and represent. If our goal is met, we will have a large wall and a lot of data that is analyzed and sorted. We can also measure it by how engaging it is with viewers, if the project succeeds it will be visually interesting and people will be encouraged to engage with it.