Jen Lewin: Interactive Sculptor
Tools and Techniques
In the construction of her pieces she uses a lot of small microcontrollers, custom electronics, Arduinos, LED lights and different types of sensors. Along with her skills in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. She is able to get the sculptures to react to specific stimuli in a way that she wants and she is able to build everything in house.
Inspiration
She was inspired by where she grew up in Maui, by this one spot where she could see the clouds and sunset and how the light changed and evolved in particular she liked how the light and clouds moved. Most of her work is to fabricate large-scale interactive sculptures that combine light, sound and motion to encourage community interaction. She thinks beyond the traditional art exhibition by focusing on sculptures made for public use in order to create an experience that brings vibrancy to neighborhoods, parks and public spaces. The high amount of interaction with the pieces essentially makes the visitors the artist because based off of everything they can transform the piece to become anything they want.
Art
The Pool
Her most known work, The Pool, which spans almost a quarter acre and consists of over 200 LED interactive, glowing, outdoor platforms. When stood upon, they interact with each other, change colors and emit sound according to pressure and speed changes brought upon by the viewers who are interacting with this exhibit. The idea came from a camping trip to Australia where they found a bunch of tidal pools lit up by the moonlight and they jumped around from tidal pool to tidal pool and she wanted to recreate that experience with these “pools of light”. It is constructed with plastic and there is no centralized computer instead it has small computers (Arduino’s) in each base, which run a couple basic rules that then propagate through the system. The sensors can tell users weight distribution, which in turn makes the lights react a certain way based of the rules programmed into the system.
The Moths
3 large silken robotic moths that flap their wings when there are people touching the controllers. The controllers are these glowing orbs that measure capacitance and when people place their hands on it the capacitance changes and the sensors pick this up and wirelessly transmit a signal to the moths to start moving and have the lights on their bodies start slowly strobing, which gives the whole exhibit a very ethereal feel.
Edison Clouds
It is constructed with 1,200 LED’s that are placed inside old incandescent bulbs. The sculpture reacts to people moving in the space by sensing their motion with some sort of camera and creates a crude image or shadow effect on the clouds. The Edison cloud also has a standard cloud pattern the plays on it when you lie in the chair, which was inspired by Jen when she was a child and used to watch clouds in Maui.
