by Tim Black
L2K or Lights 2000 is an interactive installation first exhibited at Burning Man in 1999. L2K explores the feelings of scale and the contrast between public and private space while creating a very personal image of the size of 2000 things. Evoking a "wheel of time", the effect appears as a series of patterns of light. Light that races around a circular track, creating a feeling that something is moving at great speed. The project consists of 2000 orange light emitting diodes (LEDs) mounted on the ground in a huge circle. Light patterns start as pre-programmed sequences and are modified via 200 interactive control panels holding a total of 2000 pushbuttons. This invites 'live participation' by participants to directly control the L2K patterns. People pushing the 2000 small buttons in the control tent could look out the door and see the effect of their actions written across the horizon. People anywhere nearby could see the huge ring of lights, but could only wonder who was controlling them. The microcosm and the macrocosm, illustrated on the dirt of an empty desert.
The biggest effort involved building the ring display hardware from scratch. There were five separate categories of components that made up the final form; the individual LED light pods (all 2000 of them), the micro computers that ran the light pods (200 of those), and the wire harnesses that the light pods attached to (40 at 50 feet long each). A second part of the 1999 installation was the creation of the Pattern Buffer Lounge, the command center for L2K. This site was a small, wooden framed tent-like pavilion and became a public gathering area. Event attendees were able to enter and immediately access a series of 'button boards' (there were 2000 keys on the button boards - one for every LED pod). Guests were able to tap out changes to the light patterns and see them immediately illuminated the LEDs. These patterns then began racing around the ring to create a unique pattern display.
The Fabrication Team was a volunteer group of San Francisco Bay Area artists and engineers. They worked continuously on the ring components for approximately three months leading up to the Burning Man event and also managing it as a continuing light display during its time in the desert. Over 38,000 feet of wire was used to connect all the parts. I worked about 6 months on the design and programming, giving up my "normal" job in the last month to make sure the project would be finished on time. Installing the ring components into the L2K display required a shallow trench to be dug in the playa with a 500-foot diameter. Hundreds of people helped on site to lay out and connect the 2000 feet of wiring harness and plug in the 4000 wires from the pods to the harness. We placed the L2K installation around the central Burning Man sculpture.
The fact that the pods are on the ground means that they define our sense of place and space as if they were a physical boundary. The LED ring created a secondary behavioral effect during the burn night; people accepted the L2K ring as a safety barrier and politely assembled behind it to watch the Man flame up.
The L2K ring project explores many limits of human perception. The lights could stay fixed, or change 2000 times a second. Both extremes look steady, but it was possible to sense changes up to several hundred per second. L2K also played with people's sense of scale. The pattern Buffer Lounge offered a small, intimate setting allowing users to play with the buttons, walk across it easily, and see the whole thing all at once. The big ring encloses the space of four football fields. If you were close to the work, you had to look around to see it all, if you were far away, your sense of distance became confused. L2K is a piece that because of scale of time and distance plays with the edges of human perception to evoke feelings of wonder that cannot be reproduced. You must experience it in person to understand. I really like that.
[With occasional interjections from Red Ree of Anarchists ‘r’ Us]
I enjoyed the art and performance of the Nebulous Entity at Burningman 98. The theme of Burnningman 1999 was the "Wheel of Time" and I thought of this in relationship to the Y2K phenomenon and the millennia craze.
I though: Wheel... Circle... 2000... OK, what about 2,000 lights in a circle... individually addressable... at a speed of 2,000 times a second... a Ring of artwork consisting of patterns of light! The abbreviation L2K stands for "Lights 2000".
In 1999, people were all worried about embedded computers and wondering if they would all melt down at midnight Dec 31 (it all seems so silly in retrospect) I thought I would take a bunch of embedded microcomputers and turn them into a big toy. I was pretty sure that the designers of these systems were able to deal with the problem without the world coming to a halt, and I wanted to play with the very idea of "2000" and expose some embedded microcomputers.
2000 pushbuttons under 2000 small lights, sending 2000 data packets per second over 2000 feet of wire to 2000 big lights in a 2000 foot circumference ring. How's that for your 2K.
On the surface, the hardware appears very simple: a bunch of lights turning on and off. But, from these simple components, we can produce endless combinations and patterns. On the Playa, we discovered how to play this amazing instrument – and really tweak our own perception.
This piece plays with levels of perception and sense of scale. On the one hand, the Pattern Buffer Lounge offers a small, intimate setting. You can play with the buttons, walk across it easily, and see the whole thing all at once. Just the opposite is true for the big ring out on the Playa. But at the same time, when you're in the PB lounge, feeling like you're in this private space, you're affecting the big circle. There's a gradual realization of the fact that the two contrasting spaces are connected.
There's some kind of metaphor in this. The macrocosm of the Playa being affected from the microcosm of the PB Lounge, the "as above, so below" concept, and the small influencing the large.
Human vision is an incredible pattern matching device. It has an almost unbelievable ability to look at almost anything and find what it's expecting to see; for example, seeing animals in clouds. We don't like randomness. We want patterns to emerge.
At one of the beach burns, a couple came up to the pods and started walking up and down on opposite sides, as if it were a boundary that they were exploring. Another person went and stood by one particular pod, and jumped up and down every time it flashed. This behavior is an expression of people wanting to be in harmony or in synch with their environment, even a completly artificial part of the environment.
The pods, like everything else, are the result of experimentation. Originally, we tried encasing them in foam, or casting them in cups, before finally settling on the current rugged design. The pod base is a 1.5-lb base of mortar mix or thin concrete, cast in a plastic breakfast bowl that has a straw stuck in the middle. Thus we have a tapered flattish cylindrical base with a hole running through the middle for the pod wires.
The LED lights are cast inside a plastic hemispherical lens shaped roughly like paperweight. Each LED has a pair of 1-foot wires with disconnects on the other end, so you can unplug the pods from the main harness for shipping and moving them around. The lenses, with the LEDs are then glued to the pod bases with silicon caulking, and the LED wires go down through the hole in the base.
This is a very sturdy and rugged design. We bury the bottom of the pods so the lens is sticking up about 2 inches. Once they're buried, the pods can be stepped on, driven over, etc. without taking any serious damage. We have tested them at several beach burns and they seem to withstand the sand very well. Even with abrasions and cracks, as long as the LED point source is still visible, they remain effective.
Science currently classifies the following brain wave states, which are measured in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz):
There is also Gamma state which is a hyperexcited, manic state, characterized by very large bursts of energy. It’s not clear if this is ever desirable, or if it's possible to use this state for anything.
Different light patterns produce different psychological effects. Certain frequencies of flashing lights draw the brain into different modes of operation. As we know from the Pokemon episode, they can also induce epileptic seizures, but these are merely a side effect of the brainwave shifts. The Dream Machine at Burning Man 98 was an example.
Flashing lights can bring you to states such as lucid dreaming, meditation, or out-of-body sensations. The theory is that these brain states are associated with different resonant frequencies. By providing an external stimulus at those frequencies, you can induce these same states within the brain.
This doesn't work the same for everyone. For some, it only produces very mild effects. Also, you might not necessarily be able to bring someone from Theta to Beta, for example (deep relaxation to waking state), merely by flashing lights in a pattern.
The brainwave machines so popular among certain consciousness crusaders are a very personal sort of gadget. My challenge was, could I produce these frequency shifts in a large-scale presentation? The ring can go from 1 cycle/second up to 2,000 cycles /sec. It should therefore be able to reproduce any brainwave frequency of which the human brain is capable.
[Ree: If our brains only go up to around 35 cycles per second, why do we need to run the Ring at 2,000 cycles per second?] Because running the Ring at a super-high frequency allows PWM analog effects, pulsing instead of flashing.
The particular orange is a bright and flame-like color, very much in the spirit of Burningman. It catches the attention, induces excitement. The exact light frequency is 620 nanometers.
We experimented with different colors at the beach, and this particular orange was the most compelling. It's visible at 600-1,000 feet. Some of the other colors were either too expensive or didn't carry as well. For example the white was brilliant but cost $5-6 per light, and the blue looked great but didn't carry.
There's a pulse drive that controls how the lights flash on and off. After experimentation, we found that varying the intensity of the light during the flash was far more effective than a simple on/off.
There's a peak of brightness, followed by a plateau, which then tapers off. The combination of brightness and duration is dazzling, and affects vision profoundly. It peaks at 20-25 Hz, which puts the effect in mid-Beta, a highly active brain state. The lights appear to be much brighter, and the after-image is unusually intense. [Ree: Those pods looked like eyeballs staring up out of the ground.]
Our beach experiments showed that even in peripheral vision, this flash creates a strong impression of physical movement. It actually feels like something went by you.
Since around 1976 I've been designing embedded systems with microcontrollers. Microcontrollers are tiny computers embedded in other systems. There are in things like cars, VCRs, microwaves, answering machines, phones with "features", telephone switches, Internet routers, and aircraft - especially the "fly by wire" aircraft, where the pilot doesn't directly control the plane. The thing about these embedded systems is they're invisible to most people. You only notice them when they're not working.
In this type of application, it's considered elegant engineering to design devices in such a way that they simply vanish. In this project, however, it's all visible. It's just for fun, and seems to have no commercial value.
The fun and the challenge of this project for me has been optimization: to design the components as cheaply as possible, and the code to be as efficient as possible.
The first computer I owned was a 2Mhz Altar 8080 with 256 bytes of memory. I programmed it by flipping toggle switches on the front of the machine to load binary machine code instructions one at a time.
Even as desktop computers became more powerful, a lot of the work I was doing stayed minimal. In embedded systems there is always a requirement for compact and efficient code. Programming like this is fast becoming a lost art.
[Ree: One characteristic of this project is that every component was optimized separately, and then together, after extensive empirical experimentation. Everything – the LEDs, the lenses, the software, the spectrum analyzer, and the software – has been extensively researched, compared with other elements of similar make, then deployed in prototype form for demos and tests that mimic as closely as possible the environmental conditions under which the project will eventually run.]
They are called PICs. Each one has 1,024 words (each word is 14 bits in this case) of program memory, and 128 bytes of data memory. These chips are extremely cheap at $1.70 each, which is important when you're buying 400 of them.
Currently the program is right around 800 bytes.
it consists of the following parts:
The Data communication around the ring is in 24-bit packets transmitted synchronously at 2,000 times a second. Each microcontroller simultaneously transmits and receives a packet of data using 50% of its available capacity. The other 50% of the CPU is used for decoding instructions, processing events, and displaying patterns.
Since packets are transmitted synchronously in real time, patterns from live sources can be transmitted and displayed immediately. We have a box with an audio spectrum analyzer that outputs 10 bands representing various audio frequency ranges. You can select different frequency bands to feed into the ring.
There are three different ways to get a pattern onto the Ring, and each one can be functioning simultaneously with all the others for complex overlays.
This is a very simple system, using only a few basic components. We start with a line, which is a set of points. This line is bent to form a circle. From there all other combinations are formed. We are playing within a boundary of great simplicity. This approach is the opposite of that taken by modern computer graphics programs, with their perfect shading and super-realistic rendering. In the L2K project, there isn’t a lot of preconceived structure. Any meaning is in the mind of the observer.
The Pattern Buffer can be played interactively in a number of ways. Each LED in the PB Lounge has its own button, which turns the LED on or off when pushed. A preset pattern can also set or reset the LED.
The first computer controlling the Pattern Buffer Lounge was a Z80 with 512K of battery-protected RAM and 128K of flash memory. It also has a higher-level event list with programmable date, time, and event triggers. So you can program a particular pattern to start at midnight, for example.