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Music

Classing Up The Holiday Season With Interactive Art

These aren’t your regular festive decorations.

While we’re busy setting up our Christmas trees and hanging gold colored tinsel from the ceiling, this is how they’re ringing in the holidays down in Lima, Peru. It’s a whole different affair: no tacky decorations in sight, just ethereal lamps glowing like magical beings. Called DJ Light and designed by UK-based Cinimod Studio, this installation is a gesture-controlled responsive artwork where audience members control the changing color and sounds, allowing you to become the cosmic maestro of a bewitching celestial orchestra. It works by using thermal detection technology to read the conductor’s movements, feeding them into custom software and through over 400 channels of lighting control and a multi-directional sound system. Here’s what Cinimod Studio say about it:

The installation consists of 85 giant globes of light, each capable of displaying millions of colors. As the “guest DJ” assumes their position on the podium, they can use their arms to point and gesture. These movements are translated in real-time into beautiful movements of light and generative sound across the space.

Each of the inflatable globes contains custom LED lighting, designed and fabricated for maximum controllability and energy efficiency. Each globe has a unique identity that allows the color to be controlled from the main DJ podium. Suspended above the podium is a high accuracy thermal tracking camera that has been developed by Cinimod to allow for live tracking of the “guest DJ”. By tracking every movement of the person below, this camera communicates control signals to the main software program that is responsible for the live sound and light generation.

[via Co.Design]