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'LIFE' Interactive Handwoven
A multi-sensory handwoven fabric installation with interactive fiber optics
After thirty years, I have found that what matters to living one's life is an appreciation of an imperfect body and soul. We also realize that our lives always features patterns of thoughts from other people and effects from someone else’s decisions. I would like to convey such thoughts through my piece called “LIFE”.
“LIFE” is a multi-sensory hand-woven fabric installation with interactive fiber optics that utilizes personal physical data such as my mitral valve prolapse heartbeats and the lasik-repaired-eyes blinking to create patterns through lights into the piece. It also showcases a physical aesthetic of the human body such as my skin and my scars which was interpreted into the woven pattern as well. The audience's experience and interact with the fabric by using their distance, location and body movement in relation to the piece. The projection mapping displays on the left visual that is triggered by the clicking sound of the relay modules when participants move and interact with the piece.
the shadow of the piece on the right conveys the idea of life in the past. The piece itself in the middle represents the present and the projection mapping on the left displays the future.
In order for the illuminators to operate, the system requires 9V-12V of electricity. Fig. 11 shows 8 Channels Relay Modules equipment which controls mains voltage with the Arduino Mega board. A relay is an electrically operated switch that can be turned on or off, letting the current go through or not, and can be controlled with low voltages, like the 5V provided by the Arduino pins. Controlling a relay module with the Arduino is as simple as controlling any other output. “LIFE” piece requires 3 of 8 channels relay modules as it takes 24 illuminators for the whole piece.
The TSPS platform was coded to be synchronized with Processing, every time I set the sensing grids, they will be automatically updated on Processing. With Firmata library that is uploaded to Arduino microcontroller, I was able to code to control the LEDs as well as differentiate the area of the light and sensing motion tracking of the audiences
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