Light bouncing off one disco ball looks cool...if you’re at a middle school dance. Light bouncing off 50 disco balls? That’s a work of art. Or at least it is when you use multiple projectors and 3-D scanning technology to create an immersive disco ball light installation. In Light Leaks, artists Kyle McDonald and Jonas Jongejan use that setup to fill a room with shimmering small reflections and patterned shadows that overwhelm viewers’ peripheral vision. “I was looking for a creative way of filling a space completely with projected light, allowing control over the entire field of vision of the visitor,” explains McDonald. The result is less roller rink and more intergalactic snow storm.
To achieve this effect, the artists placed a pile of multi-sized disco balls in the middle of a room and pointed three light projectors at them. From there, they took a series of 3-D scans to capture the varying patterns of light reflecting off the balls and where they hit on the walls. This allows them to reconstruct a 3-D model of the pixels in the room.
The whole process is an experiment to produce “structured light,” which McDonald explains this way: “If you project a circle onto a single mirror, you'll see a circle on the wall. If you project a circle on a pile of mirror balls, you'll see random scattered lights on the wall. So if you want to see a circle on the wall, you have to label every reflection and figure out where it's coming from in the projection. Once you have all those labels, then you can project whatever you want.”
Much of McDonald’s works revolves around using code to make basic hardware do not-so-basic things. All of the code used for Light Leaks is available online, and McDonald encourages people to download it, tweak it and make something even cooler than what he created. “I'm happiest when people use my work as a starting point to make something even better I couldn't have imagined,” he says.
