If you exist in San Francisco , you may have seem some otherworldly lights radiating from the train tracks near your house this summertime . If so , you may take off your tin hydrofoil hat : It was just the latest project of Aaron Koblin , the Creative Director of Google ’s Data Arts Team , and theater director Ben Tricklebank .
You might remember Koblin from his synergistic visualization ( he created the interactional video recording for the Arcade Fire’sWilderness Downtown ) , and Tricklebank heads up the product companyTool . But this summer , the duet are taking part inStation to Station , a caravan full of artists and musician that ’s winding its direction across the state putting on art appearance and concerts . Their contribution , an experiment calledLight Echoes , ties into train locomotion in a very actual way .
Light Echoes is a digital pressman of sort — but only by the most conceptual definition . It ’s a high - powered optical maser attached to a wheeled boom , which rolls along the train tracks at a set speed . The laser projects light onto the surrounding landscape , one picture element at a time . In someone , it looks like a brief trail of LED light . But captured in long - pic photographs ( using aRed EPICcamera ) , the projections form cohesive epitome — anything from a radiation diagram to a quote from Walt Whitman . The contraption literally prints in light , thanks to train infrastructure put down decades ago . According to Koblin , who emailed from the train ’s Minneapolis end last night , it cast “ visual echoes of the railroad train ’s front wander upon the landscape . ”
Because the boom setup is so elaborate — you could see some progress shots onWired — it wo n’t in reality be play along Koblin aboard the Station to Station train this hebdomad . Instead of dragging the custom contraption behind the train , they ’ll be showing a celluloid of the project ( learn above ) . But that does n’t mean they ’re done with Light Echoes . “ Our original hope and desire was to make it focalise around visualizing live performance , ” Koblin say . “ I ’m really optimistic that we ’ll be capable to take this melodic theme to its next iteration . Light Echoes has been a large experiment and we ’ve learned so much . ”
Station to Station ’s next halt is Santa Fe , with performances by Cat Power and art by Carsten Höller . control out the full lineuphere .
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