Serpentine Currents

I had the honor to work on ‘Serpentine Currents – Fragments of a Changing Future’, a Somerset House courtyard installation by artist Dana-Fiona Armour. Working with Art and Assembly, who constructed the sculptures, I specified, imported and programmed the LED mesh which illuminates the resin sculptures. The LED Mesh is effectively a video screen, so I programmed the waves in Touch Designer using provided ocean temperature and salinity data. I created a system which loops over the dataset and feeds the values into a GLSL Shader which renders the waves. This approach allowed us to fine-tune the ranges of brightness, colour and pulse speed on the fly before finialising them into a video file which is played from a media player for better reliability.