Micah is a visual and new media artist that takes an engineering approach to her work. She has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Micah hacks/reverse engineers electronic devices and computer programs to create interesting words of art that bridge the gap between art and technology. In collaboration with Adafruit, Micah developed FadeCandy, an open source NeoPixel driver designed for LED art. She uses FadeCandy in her own art projects, such as her piece “Triangle Attractor” as well as “Ecstatic Epiphany”.
Triangle Attractor
From her art portfolio website she describes Triangle Attractor as “… a generative algorithm based on this triangular form. Bundles of glowing particles fade into existence to be immediately drawn to three attraction points at the corners of the piece. The forces from these competing gravitational attractors chaotically separate the particle bundle, until the algorithm loses interest and the cycle ends. Colors are sampled from a photo taken at the High Desert Test Sites. Negative space in the sculpture is made tangible by a set of triangular plastic cut-outs from each layer.”
Ecstatic Epiphany
From her art portfolio website she describes Ecstatic Epiphany as “… a human-scale window into an imaginary space, installed in public behind an existing glass block wall. This piece is for anyone on the sidewalk to watch and control. Walking past it, your movement is amplified into a shift in perspective. Sometimes this is a passive action, other times it can lead to a dramatic change as chaos unfolds in the generative algorithms. The choreography of this mathematical world forms a continuous cyclic narrative of creation, depression, agency, and rebirth. Each moment is unique, echoed but never repeated.”
Micah has many other really interesting artistic/technical projects documented on her webpage. Check out more of her work at http://www.misc.name/. Also check out her technical blog: scanlime.org as well as her youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/micahjd for some of her really neat hacking projects.