Lighter Self

Initially for this project, I had wanted to collect data every hour for a week about what I was doing / what was on my mind. However, I found that my observations of my behavior were in fact influencing how I was acting. I was also not disciplined enough to collect enough hourly data to create a meaningful piece.

So instead I decided to look at a lightshow I programmed for Robotaki’s current tour, go cue by cue for two songs, and use color information to create self portraits. We had 14 fixtures, each with ten pixels.

The first song, ‘I Want You’ unfolds in the horizontal direction, left to right. Each cue is given equal space in the horizontal domain, regardless of how long the cue actually lasted in the song. The vertical domain is subdivided so that each light pixel is given equal spacing, with the top half representing the entirety of the top row of lights, and the bottom half representing the bottom row of lights. It serves more to show an overall ratio of colors.

I Want You” - Robotaki x Manila Killa

I Want You

For this song, the time domain elapses from top to bottom. This is a one-to-one representation of the lighting rig, with each pixel in the art representing a pixel on the lights. I’ve also arranged the pixels of the lights horizontally, which is actually how it is setup on stage. The lights were arranged in two rows, with seven columns. So there are 70 pixels horizontally (10 pixels per light). And since each cue takes up two rows of pixels (one row representing each row of lights) and there are 43 cues in this song, there are a total of 86 rows.

Brooklyn 1995” - Robotaki

Brooklyn 1995

Written on October 2, 2018