Video of a project I worked on featured at the Luminato Arts Festival in Toronto 2008.

The spectacle was made up of 250 4-6 foot balloons strung above the square from a spider’s web of cables. Each balloon lit from inside by an array of red, green and blue LEDs (for infinite colour mixing possibility). The physical installation was the work of KPMB architects.

We (Media Lab Toronto) were invited to creat a series of lighting effects influenced by the sounds picked up from the square below.

The software was all created from scratch in a few hairy weeks. A PD patch listened to the microphone inputs and fed data to a Processing sketch that created the lighting effects and passed the data to a Java DMX layer that communicated with the lighting system.

More information at: medialabtoronto.ca/category/luminato-balloons

by: Patrick Dinnen, David McCallum, Gabe Sawhney