Project Updates: October 2023

If you’re familiar with Reno, Nevada, you know that over the past couple of years there has been a lot of development in downtown, especially in the Neon Line district along West 4th Street. The district is envisioned as a regional destination for gaming, music, and large-scale art, especially art that taps into Reno’s history as a neon-lit gaming town. There are already at least a dozen sculptures installed along the Line, and many of these originally appeared at Burning Man between 2015 and 2023. Since Burning Man sculptures are typically not designed for weather resistance, longevity, or public safety, significant work is required to prepare these artworks for permanent exhibition. This often involves a complete replacement (or at least augmentation) of the original lighting system.

I’ve been trying for a while to get involved in one of these projects, hoping to score a contract with the Neon Line developer (Jacobs Entertainment) to do some of the lighting work. Well, I recently hit the jackpot on that. Within a period of one week, I was tapped for three different projects! Below is a brief summary of each project. I’ll follow up later with more details as my designs get further along.

Bee Dance

This sculpture, created for Burning Man 2019 by artist Andrea Greenlees and metal fabrication wizard Andy Tibbetts, is currently on display in the Neon Line district. However, the developer wants to increase the overall brightness and add some eye-catching dynamic elements to the lighting. My proposal will include adding backlit colored glass to the eyes and portions of the wings, as well as addressable RGB LED strips at the center axis of each Bee.

The LED strips will be hidden inside a four-sided “LED core” with two segments, each of which aligns with the axis of the Bee’s thorax or abdomen. Metal covers over the non-light emitting portions of the core will be painted to match the sculpture, camouflaging the core to some extent during daytime.

This project has a couple of new challenges for me. On most of my previous projects I was able to hide power supplies, controllers, and associated cabling inside the sculpture. But that approach doesn’t work well for this “skeletal” sculpture. Fortunately, I have the luxury of a temperature-controlled electronics enclosure that is already installed near the sculpture. But the enclosure is about 20 feet (6.1m) away from the base of the furthest Bee. To avoid any potential LED flickering caused by data signal integrity issues, I plan to implement an RS-422 differential interface between the controller and the base of each LED core. This will entail developing a new controller board (a variant of the FLiCr board) and a small receiver board, but I’m confident that these will come in handy for many future projects.

All of the lighting along the Neon Line is controlled (to varying degrees) by a wide area network (WAN) that also provides access to security cameras, irrigation controllers, etc. The global lighting control protocol may be Art-Net or sACN (I’m not sure which), but at each artwork site these protocols are turned into one or more DMX512 interfaces for controlling individual lighting fixtures.

My controller will be largely autonomous, but it needs to be commandable to some extent by the global lighting network. At minimum my controller needs to support the following remote commands:

• Turn on/off
• Report status (on/off, error conditions, etc.)
• Set color palette. This will be used to implement district-wide color themes on holidays and special occasions.

So there’s the second challenge: my controllers don’t currently support an interface of this type. But it seems like the DMX Remote Device Management (RDM) interface is exactly what I need here, and there are existing software libraries that will (hopefully) make implementation straightforward. Hardware-wise, I’ll just need to implement an additional serial port for this interface.

Desert Guard

This massive 35 foot (10.7m) tall sculpture was created for Burning Man 2018 by Chinese artist Lu Ming.

Desert Guard was previously on display in the Neon Line district, but was temporarily removed due to nearby construction. When it is reinstalled in a different location in early 2024, the developer has again asked for brighter, more colorful, more dynamic lighting.

I haven’t had a chance to spend much time thinking about what I’ll propose, but the intricate metalwork, with many openings to the spacious interior, suggest numerous possibilities.

Odyssey

Odyssey was created by Australian artist Clayton Blake for Burning Man 2023. The 27 foot (8.2m) tall sculpture is made of polished stainless steel, and represents a vintage toy rocket.

The artist’s presentation of Odyssey at Burning Man was quite a spectacle. Every evening at sunset, the artist and his silver-suited crew enacted an intricate launch and flight sequence, including stirring music, heartfelt farewells and salutes to the departing astronaut, flashing lights, blastoff (CO₂ smoke generator), and an unexpected flight emergency with a dramatic recovery. Good fun!

I’ve proposed that we attempt to recreate the feeling of this launch/flight sequence, minus the flight crew and astronaut. Fortunately I have the benefit of working closely with the artist, who I’ve known since 2019. This will be a massive project with multiple challenges, such as synchronizing the lighting effects with music, controlling moving head DMX light fixtures, and controlling a professional-grade DMX fog machine.

Instead of running the launch sequence on a time-based schedule, I’ve proposed that the sequence be triggered by some type of viewer interaction. Imagine walking down 4th Street and encountering a huge shiny rocket with a blinky-light control panel right next to the sidewalk. Who could resist pushing the big red button? But nothing happens…and then you notice another control panel just out of reach, with an urgently blinking light. Anyway, the idea is that two people have to cooperate (and perhaps solve a simple puzzle) to trigger the launch.

OK, enough of that. I’ve got to get back to creating the detailed proposals for these new contracts. I’ve also been busy with several other projects, but I’ll save that for next month’s update.

Thanks for reading! In case you haven’t already discovered this, an index of all 39 of my previous blog posts can be found here.