The first installation was the "Abduction Chambers of the Nebulous Entity", a part of the larger Nebulous Entity theme story. This was a performance held in two large dome rooms. People lined up for hours to be processed by the "aliens" acting in this space. Tim supplied lighting and sound design, and two large interactive sculptures, the "Trite Pulp Sucker" and the "Think Tank". The Trite Pulp Sucker was a platform that that a person would stand on. Six vacuum operated arms with sound effects and vibrating motors would then descend around the person and "suck out all the trite pulp from their brains". The "Think Tank" was a large triangle tank on drainpipe legs that had a central lighting tube with lasers shining on servo mounted crystals. (The story was, it held all the extracted worthless thoughts.)
In keeping with the "wheel of time" theme in 1999, Tim created the L2K project, a circle of 2000 lights planned to be 636 feet in diameter. (This was the plan, It was actually installed as a 500 foot ring, with the pods 9 inches apart) These lights were installed surrounding the central figure of the man and buried in the playa. Patterns of light moved around the circle at up to 2000 feet per second. The system was built in 40 harnesses of 50 drive outputs each. Each harness attached to 50 LEDs sealed into clear plastic pods. Each harness has 5 PIC microchips. A laptop computer was used to load the patterns into the Z180 based control system. Meanwhile 2000 feet away, a 20 foot diameter dome contained a ring of 200 circuit boards, mounted around the inside of the dome, about 5 feet off the floor. Each board had 10 LEDs and 10 pushbuttons (2000 total). People wandered around pushing buttons and changing the lights moving around the room. The rings were linked and whatever happened in the lounge was matched in the big ring
In 2000, the L2K ring was reinstalled, without the lounge, and two new devices were hauled into the desert. These were the large and small HypKnowTrons. The small one was 6 feet across and had three blades contained red, green, and blue LEDs The pattern of light on the blades was driven by a microphone. Crowds gathered every night to shout, sing, and marvel at the patterns of lights created by their noise. The 10-foot large HypKnowTron had 120 full color blending picells (a total of 124 microcontrollers) but was mechanically unstable and only ran two nights.
For 2001 a paraglider instructor named Gaspo rebuilt the hub and blades of the large HKT. Tim added a radio link to the controller and built a series of interaction gadgets to transmit data patterns. The result was a huge disk of full spectrum lights, controlled by a bar code scanner, a microphone, and a joystick. The L2K project was updated with four audio control towers. Each control tower was positioned at a quarter of the ring circle and would run the entire ring for a few minutes. Anyone near the tower could change the ring of lights by making a sound near the control tower. However, too much sound and the tower would shut off, transferring the control point to a new random location.
Tim Black’s art has been featured in "New Scientist" Magazine , TechTV, and on the PBS mini series "The Power of Play".
http://www.skellington.com/L2K
The project for 2002