Light City Competition Entry

Last year was the first year of this Light City festival here in Baltimore. There was about 18 light installations along Baltimore’s inner harbor. It was pretty cool. They had a stage with free concerts and stuff last year. Dan Deacon played. The one thing about last year is they didn’t have too many interactive light installations. So it was a bunch of stuff that looked cool, but that was about it. Anyways, the call for entries deadline was today. Myself, my friend from work and one of my cousins who just graduated with a degree in electrical engineering teamed up and put this proposal together. They are trying to have between 25-30 installations this year. Each installation can get between $5,000 – $75,000 for the design/ materials/ construction. My buddy Eric and I cranked out all of this from last Wednesday to Sunday. Probably about 20 hours of time each, I think it came out pretty cool, and succinct with the call for entries. Ours is estimated at $15,250 including 3,000 in design/construction fees. It was a PDF Submission, below is the exact pages from that. We’ll hear back in November. We had to do all sorts of artist resumes and past art samples as part of the submission, as long with fee spreadsheets.

http://lightcity.org/

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Final Submission Design Final Submission Design2 Final Submission Design3 Final Submission Design4 Final Submission Design5 Final Submission Design6 Final Submission Design7

8 Comments

  1. I think this turned out really great! I really like that it is interactive, but is still simple. I personally love interactive stuff like this, I can’t help but engage with it. I think interactivity helps to make the whole thing more social, people put on a show for other people, and the hole thing becomes a social event. Nice work, also impressed with how fast you guys cranked this thing out.

    On another note I think the images turned out really really good, the lighting effects on all the entourage really help to sell the whole idea. It is all very convincing.
    I think you should make this thing do double duty, make a few edits and submit it for the annual warming hut competition. I see a couple similarities in what we were trying to do with the warming hut, I think it is the right size and scale and could be Really fun as a warming hut (if you submit it to the warming hut comp maybe add a couple solar panels for off grid power?)
    Great work, can’t wait to hear the results.

  2. Thanks, I think the simplicity of the forms will lead to easy construction.
    The renders were challenging because of the lighting as you noted. I shot all the backgrounds in raw, and adjusted the base image to be pretty dark. Then opened the .CR2 file again and cranked the hue way down so everything had that blue glow. Then just painted over the mask to reveal the background. I think it was pretty convincing.

    Love the idea of re purposing it for warming huts. Lets keep that one in mind. Perhaps we can do something similar for that competition. Looks like the deadline is monday Oct 3rd 2016

  3. Wow that’s a really cool idea, I love the form derivation. Hopefully having a more interactive installation will push your entry to the top and get it built. Are you the one doing the construction if it is selected?

  4. Oh yeah like Logan mentioned the renderings turned out great! Very impressive with the colors on the installation and the glow they give off. Pretty cool that you did this in 40 hours total as well.

  5. Thanks Kato,
    Only one or two exhibitions last year were interactive, so we knew that was a must for this installation. I heard they received over 1,000 entries. So I am nervous about our chances of getting selected. But I don’t think we could have done anything else to showcase our idea.
    If we get selected, then we would be in charge of building the thing. I think we could pull it off pretty effectively. The whole thing is modular. So we’d build each rib structure and floor, then bolt it to the one next to it. We’d shrink wrap the whole thing on site. The boat shrink wrap stuff comes in huge rolls. So we could wrap it after its all constructed onsite.

    We haven’t gotten a chance to really study what the programming of the lights would be. The ones we are specifying can do anything, even create a image. We are just showing it as a ‘heat map’ right now, but I think it could be much cooler if we were selected.

  6. I think if you decide to submit this for the warming hut competition you should call it “Drift”. Do some post rationalizing and make a set of diagrams showing how a snow drifts are formed, then how pieces were removed and you came upon the form. I think your diagrams are really great here, but for a warming hut competition some drift diagrams might fit this thing really well.

    • Also the lights as a heat map would be perfect for a warming huts competition.

  7. Logan,
    I love this idea. Its the perfect adaptation of the Light City entry. I am trying to figure out how to power this thing using energy created by people stepping on a platform. It has to be off the grid. Solar is too expensive for the project. I dont know. But I love the name Drift. Good call!

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