For my Nature of Code final, I presented a part of my working thesis to show how the lighting pattern of the project was using principles learned from class.  I struggled for some time to try to come up with a sketch that would make sense for the project but also stay true to the nature of the piece.   As the development for Radical Everything began from ideas regarding emergent ecologies and thus the idea of simple interactions creating more complex behaviors and patterns, I thought it at first appropriate to come up with a lighting pattern that would mimic more closely that of a cellular automata pattern.  So I began to code a 1-Dimensional sketch that would turn my LEDs from a HIGH to LOW state based on these simple algorithms.  However, I began to quickly realize that any user who would be entering the field of this installation would quickly become confused at what would be a seemingly random pattern of lighting without any basis or grounding in what the sketch was actually doing.  Therefore I began a second sketch based on Dan Shiffman’s advice that more closely adhered to my midterm in which “seeds” were generated (in this case by a threshold value in my potentiometer, which will soon be replaced by a proximity sensor) that would cause neighboring lights in the array to fade on, based on a passing function of time as it looped through each LED in my array.  For future iterations, I would love to add more dynamic behavior to the lighting pattern such as: (a) adding oscillation to the timing so that the lights would fade on and off more dynamically, and (b) adding genetic behavior to the lighting so that each subsequent generation of the lighting pattern would adhere more towards areas of higher activity in the installation.

Detailed view showing the LEDs arrayed around one node of the installation.

source code for lighting sketch here