I worked full time at Philip Beesley Studio for 4 years, and now I do occassional work as an electrical design contractor/consultant. My primary role while I was full time at the company was designing and building large interactive art sculptures.
Noosphere, Futurium, Berlin, 2019
Noosphere was the first large installation I did with PBSI. It was built as an art exhibit in the newly constructed Futurium museum in Berlin. In the planning stage I scope the project, sourced materials, specified equipment and network requirements, planned power capacity and power/data distribution. I organized production of the actuators, sensors, controllers, and cabling, and tested every piece of equipment before going to install the piece in a 9 day, 120 hour sprint. On site, I led an team of local assistants and installed our devices, routed the cables, and tested the system with our newly developed Testbed Control software.
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In 2021 I returned for a preventative maintenance visit to replace all the “moth” vibration actuators and to test some software upgrades. We found that the motors we used in the moths had a lifespan of just a couple years in the sculpture, so we made replacement assemblies in Toronto and installed them in 2 days on site.
In 2022 I returned again to fix an issue that caused most of the microcontrollers in the sculpture to crash and be inaccessible to the local computer. Before we figured out the problem, we were concerned that we had damaged the microcontrollers in our previous visit while applying some stickers to reduce the light pollution from the indicator LEDs. Our old generation of hardware had a known issue that caused the microcontroller’s 5V regulator to burn out under certain conditions. Before going, we had the museum’s staff ship a couple of the controllers back to us, and to our surprise I found that they were all perfectly functional (electrically). The only thing wrong with them was that none of them were visible serial devices until they were manually put into bootloader mode. We had the museum staff try doing this for a couple more controllers, and it only took another day before we started seeing them disappear again.
We ended up figuring out that there was an incorrectly formatted cron job on the on-site computer that started a script that restarted the Raspberry Pi’s, which in turn ran a script to re-flash firmware to all the controllers in the sculpture every minute for an hour; when this happened, there was a timing condition that could cause a microcontroller’s upload to be interrupted, corrupting the program. And unlike some microcontrollers, these aren’t recognized as serial devices by default (there is a piece of code added by the loader program to the user program). So every night we would loose a couple more devices as the timing for their upload changed due to the loss of other devices.
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I was able to replicate the issue on our testbed in Toronto and confirm it produced the same result; so the solution was to fix the cron job and go manually reset all the controllers in the sculpture.
Since that fix was so easy and I had to go there anyways, I also took the opportunity to demo some new tech that we were developing - our “Living Shadows” projection. Essentially we have a real, static object that casts a shadow behind it from the projector, but we morph the shadow to make it look like the real object is subtly changing. The demo went really well and we started talking about plans to develop this tech for a new collection that the museum was working on.
Meander, Tapestry Hall, Cambridge (ON), 2020
Meander is the largest installation I’ve built with PBSI. The physical installation of the piece took 2 months, compared to the 10 days for Noosphere. While each sculpture has its own unique challenges, it is a process that becomes more refined and efficient each time. Tasks like creating drawings and tracking documents become streamlined, and allowed me to put more time into testing and improving the manufacturability and reliability of our devices.
During testing I was able to identify the specific circumstances that caused a recurring hardware failure with our microcontrollers. We would find that a microcontroller would all of a sudden stop working, only to find that the processor was extremely hot. From some digging online, we knew our controller (the Teesny 3.2) was very sensitive to overvoltage on its GPIOs, and this “burnout” issue seemed to be related to hot swapping cables. Through testing, I found that while the power cable was being plugged or unplugged from one of the daughter boards, there was a transitory state where only the power contact was connected, and parts of the daughter board’s circuit rose to the input voltage (12V). The boards were designed with no shared ground, so the only connections they shared were through signal pins to the Teensy’s GPIOs. And with some parts of the daughter board’s circuit rising to 12V, they were able to form a loop to ground through the Teensy’s GPIOs. That exposed a 12V source to the 5V tolerant pins of the Teensy, causing damage that would eventually kill it. Unfortunately it doesn’t kill the chip instantly - that would have made it much easier to figure out the cause.
Grove, Venice, 2021
In 2021 we completed our installation for the delayed 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. In addition to a sculpture canopy, Grove consisted of an array of custom speakers playing audio from a Max patch, a short film projected on the floor, and a choreographed DMX lighting sequence all kept in sync through Touch Designer and a version of our Testbed Control software.
Grove was the first large installation our team had done almost completely remotely (almost = two former employees were present). Because almost every piece of our sculptures is custom made, we had to be even more rigorous with our documentation, testing, and packing to make the installation process as smooth as possible. This project also landed in the middle of an extremely busy year, with many of our other clients anxious to complete projects now that covid restrictions lifting. Thankfully by this time we had the strongest group of people I’ve ever worked with, and we managed to pull off a beautiful installation (that sadly none of us got to see or hear in person).
Grove is was subsequently re-installed in the Hong Kong Design Institute for exhibition in 2023, using the same installation documents.
Reef, Ar Frout Castle, Carantec, 2021
Reef came at the end of our packed 2021. Our client was a private collector who wanted to create an event space with the sculpture. They wanted a turnkey system that would be robust and would have no need to be maintained as a ‘testbed’. We planned to make the system relatively simple: a handful of chains of custom LED lights, no sensors, and a simple cloud-like behaviour driven by a Perlin noise function. We decided that the Testbed Control system would be overkill, and wasn’t hardened enough to use in a turnkey art piece. Instead, we took our relatively simple, robust, and modular SAI firmware and turned it into a class that could be instantiated into multiple virtual devices on our sculpture hardware. The chains of lights were activated when the Perlin noise at their x and y coordinate went above a threshold. This laid the groundwork for Poietic Veil, where we extended this lightweight system even further with the help of our new hardware.
Poietic Veil, Delft, 2023
Poietic Veil was my last installation with PBSI, which was a nice book-end to my tenure there because I did a workshop at the same university (TU Delft) one week after I joined the company. This trip was also a week-long workshop where we taught students in the “Interactive Environments” program about our approach to interactive exhibits. At the end of the workshop we put together a small (by our standards) sculpture that is part of a multi-year long collaboration with TU Delft and Delft Science Centre.
This project was the first deployment of the hardware system and updated ”moth” actuators I designed, which both performed really well. The capacitive sensing in the mylar fronds was so satisfying - you could brush your hand through the sea of fronds and have the sculpture vibrate and light up in response. It was the most fun I’ve ever seen people have with our sculptures. Especially because the sensing mechanism wasn’t obvious, it just seemed like magic.
This was also our first deployment of our new, more distributed software topology. Instead of a top-down control system where a single computer simulated virtual effects and puppeted all the actuators, each controller determined its own response to synchronized generative behaviour effects. This was a huge step forwards for our long term research goals of creating massive decentralized systems where emergent behaviour can develop.
