Dancing mirror light boxes

After going way hard-core the last couple of years, I'm taking it easy for this year's burning man.  Thus I'm only doing a moderate-sized art project.  A friend of mine asked me to create some interesting lighting for a dance/chill/meditation space complex she's designing. 

I came up with the idea of creating a lamp that is surrounded by inward-facing mirrors so that light must bounce one or more times before exiting the box of mirrors.  By appropriately shaping the exit holes, I can get multitudes of interesting patterns.  The resulting light cast out seems to be equal parts geometry, fractal patterns, and randomness. 

( mini-rant about inadequacy of 3D modeling software )

One of the constraints of the project was that the light pattern should have fivefold symmetry.  This limited my choice of shapes.  I settled on something akin to a five-sided pyramid with a truncated top, attached to an inverted mirror of itself at the bottom.

Here's what it looks like in the light:


On the inside:


And here's the light pattern it casts with various choices of exit hole:


These pictures are okay, but imagine that each little pattern copy moves in a different direction when you move the lightbulb.  The results are hypnotic ... each pattern encircles the others in a luminous pentagonal square-dance. 


Note that this is a 1/3 scale version with a very dim lamp.  The real version is supposed to light up a 60ft dome, so I'll need a much brighter lamp, like this 750W monster:   (This is me comparing its brightness against the brightness of the projectors it will be competing with.)

 

Journey to the center of America

A couple of months I flew out to meet a friend of mine in Tennessee.  She was traveling south from Philadelphia to visit some family in Georgia, and we thought it would be an interesting place to meet up.  Most of my US travel has been limited to the coasts.  I feel like I have never been to "middle America", and it seemed that eastern Tennessee would have an interesting mix of Appalachian culture and good places to hike. 

Thus I present our adventures:

Dollywood:


Dollywood is a theme park devoted to, yes, you guessed, Dolly Parton.  How could we pass up this epic kitsch?   Dollywood is located in Pigeon Forge TN, which could be briefly described as Las Vegas for the rural South.  The town is all glitz, filled with flashing lights, Confederate memorabilia shops, and little mini-theme-parks offering only one or two rides. 

This was the oddest of them all.   This building, located right on a major road, must be responsible for gobs of accidents every year from rubbernecking tourists.  This is not part of Dollywood:

There's a basckstory involving a plantation in the Caribbean, a hurricane, a scientific experiment gone wrong.  In any case, it was really awesome to run into this at 2am when we were both very tires. 

Back to Dollywood.  We came up with the brilliant strategy of going to Dollywood on a slightly drizzly Thursday, which meant that we had no trouble at all getting on any of the rides.  I was the solo rider on their largest rollercoaster for about half an hour.  I tried out all the different seats to see how it affected the experience.  :-)  (My friend got tired by the 4th roller coaster ride or so)

( more details )

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This is long.   I will break it up into multiple entries.

Journey to the center of America, pt 2 - art

When we last left our fair heroes, they were in Eastern Tennessee. 

Art:


The city of Gatlinburg TN was also kitschy, but more in a faux-traditional Appalachian kind of way.  There was something that looked interesting though -- a 8-or-so mile road through the country with a loose association of small craft shops called the "Gatlinburg Arts and Crafts Community".  We went to a lot of the shops and met some of the artists and craftspeople.  It was interesting talking to them -- they had all the passion and creativity that I'd expect, but they also were, for a lack of a better word, "normal".  There was none of the wildness that I've come to expect out of most of the career artists I know in San Francisco.  They were very nice and friendly, but if you met them at a supermarket, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart from any of the other small-town residents. 

Here's some of the art:

Bowls constructed from sliced walnuts.  I bought a couple.

The word "cephalic" occurred to me as the appropriate adjective for a sliced walnut's appearance.  They look like little MRI cross sections. 

Uprooted root systems, carved and polished:


Works in progress:

What other artists get to work with chainsaws on a regular basis? 

Journey to the center of America pt 3: Misc Americana

It's a little-known fact that Sevierville TN (pronounced severe-vull by the locals) is home to the world's largest As-Seen-On-TV store.  I didn't even know such stores existed.  Of course we had to peek inside:


Yes, dearie, you can microwave bacon, now in this convenient new appliance.   What a convenience!  And it still tastes great!

Don't live in Tennessee?  Don't worry, they have a website!

Yes, they advertised products one at a time over the broadcast medium of television, aggregated all these products for parallel browsing in bricks-and-mortar retailers, and then ensured that you neither need experience the harsh linearity of televised communication nor the logistical hassle of leaving your house by creating an online retailer.  Woohoo!

( Cut for length )