Award-winning conceptual artist Nicholas Tory’s latest immersive project is the Mini Beasts, currently touring the country. He was inspired to come up with a hybrid between nature and technology—a gesture-controlled humming Neon Cuckoo Bee, an enormous proximity-activated Swallowtail Butterfly, and a touch-sensor-triggered singing Cicada.
The Mini Beasts are all Australian Species – Swallowtail Butterfly, Jumping Spider, Neon Cuckoo Bee, and Cicada. Inspired by motorcycle and sports car space-frame structures, the Mini Beasts are engineered to be tourable, lightweight and strong.
For Nicholas and his team of designers and artists based at his Ample Projects studio in Sydney, the Mini Beasts are the result of thousands of hours of work.
Designed and modelled in 3D first, each creature was then the subject of hundreds of rendered plans and elevations for the steel artisans before handmade steel frames were forged, hand-shaped and then welded together.
The cicada has 3D printed eyes, the bee has 3D printed antenna caps. Each Mini Beast has a lighting system, a power delivery system, a sound system, an interactive sensor input system, and a lighting design and control system, all hand-assembled and completely custom made from parts for the project.
The butterfly has 2800 lights in its body and wings and over 1km of cabling. Triggered by a laser-powered proximity sensor, the viewer can activate lighting displays combined with music and sound playback designed by Ample Studio’s composer Jonathan Nix as they approach the sculpture.
At four metres tall, the butterfly’s double-sided pixel mapped wings are inspired by real microscope photography of iridescent butterfly wings, and the high-resolution effect is immersive, as the wings appear to come alive with refracted light.
The Neon Cuckoo Bee has approximately 1500 lights, and two laser sensors in her antennae making her interactive. The viewer can manipulate the lighting displays and sound playback individually without touching the sensors by moving their hand or body towards and away from the ends of the antennae. The bee hums with sympathetic music and sound effects, resulting in a dialogue between the user and Mini Beast.
The iridescent cicada has 600 lights and 6 touch panels on its wings that trigger cicada song.
Textile technician Leah Benson designed skins and coverings that are hand-sewn and glued to the steel exoskeletons—the materials were sourced from a wide range of places and were inspired by a wide range of sources including nature, science fiction, craft, and haute-couture fashion design.
Designed and engineered in Sydney, the steel structures were hand made in China by traditional Chinese lantern artisans, to contemporary and futurist-inspired Australian designs. Ample’s lighting designer Blake Garner, in collaboration with artistic director Nick Tory, selected all the lighting hardware, which was purchased in China, and installed into the frameworks after the structures were painted, and then sent to Sydney. There, Ample’s design team were ready to complete the final stages of the process, installation of lighting control, cabling, and power systems and the coverings. All custom designed lighting control systems were hand-assembled in Sydney by Blake Garner.
Through the four years that Ample ran the award-winning Taronga Vivid precinct, they developed many techniques and approaches to their light sculptures. Based on this experience, they were looking to do something new, and Mini Beasts was a step forward for the design and execution of their objects’ coverings. Led by Leah Benson and Nick Tory, Ample’s team of textile technologists, developed a new approach for the coverings, inspired by the other-worldly microscopic characteristics of the creatures that inspired Mini Beasts. These new coverings have proven to be harder wearing, and much more detailed and impactful.
LIGHTING DESIGN AND CONTROL SYSTEM DESIGN
LED has been a transformative technology in modern artworks. The brightness and vibrant colours have offered spectacular and eye-catching artworks, sometimes with thousands of pixels working together to create movement and colour. But with the rapid advancement of LEDs, some key components in artistic lighting have been lost. LEDs have a digital, artificial feel. They are garish and harsh. But with care and skill, these obstacles can be overcome to restore a sense of organic, natural movement in the artwork’s lighting, while still keeping all the advantages LEDs have to offer.
The ultra-fast response times of LEDs often leads to a choppy or “steppy” animation feeling. By increasing the frame rate to 120fps, a smoother and fluid animation emerges. LEDs also suffer from poor performance when fading between brighter or darker colours – by applying custom curves, the bottom end of these curves are smoothed out, giving the illusion of a smoother fade from off to full. The initial jolt of an LED fading up is addressed with sub-frame adjustments: LEDs are deliberately cycled between 0% and 1% brightness at very high speeds – as much as 400 times per second – a process known as dithering – to further enhance the smoothness of an LED’s fade from 0% to full. To achieve such precise control of every pixel, custom hardware is utilised that manages much of the dithering and colour correction. Where more LEDs are utilised than a single processor can manage, a sophisticated pairing system allows multiple processor units to share the load of the pixel processing in real-time with seamless synchronisation between all devices in the order of a few milliseconds or less.
Supporting this intricate processing at the pixel layer is a suite of animation effects and styles deliberately chosen to provide organic, natural animations that are generated on the fly. By generating animations on the fly, seamless, fluid transitions that do not need to be rendered in advance allow greater flexibility in an artwork’s expression and responsiveness. By utilising the real-time synchronisation system, an artwork can scale from just a few hundred LEDs to many thousands, with just a network switch and extra controllers required to synchronise the system together.
The system supports a comprehensive set of input triggers. Network messages over UDP or TCP can be sent to direct the start, stop, change in speed, fade up or down, change in colour, or shift in position of any layer in the overall stack of effects running live on the system. Sensors modules can be integrated and a set of rules can be applied to then direct how the animations can change.
Finally, as part of the animation triggering system, an audio module can be added which applies the ability for various music or sound effect clips to be started and stopped before being mixed and output. This brings the visual experience of artwork into the aural realm, providing extra dimensionality to the artwork.
