FIXTURE

remote installation made with custom hardware + software

Description

FIXTURE is a continuous mapping between my smartphone’s X, Y, and Z accelerometer values and the red, green, and blue intensities of an LED light strip.

Implementation

FIXTURE is an array of 60 lights; each light corresponds to a data packet describing the physical orientation of my phone. The mapping from sensor value to color is as naive as possible, with X, Y, and Z accelerometer values linearly scaled to R, G, and B lighting intensities.

Continuity

Packets arrive about once a minute; as one packet arrives, it populates the leftmost position in the LED array and the previous packets move one position to the right.

Packets are sent every minute that my cellphone is on; if the phone loses network access, it batches readings and sends them when connection is restored.

The result is a series of colors representing periods of one posture or another: a line of ten identical blues when I set the phone down to charge; a patch of mottled pinks where it was jostling about in my bag as I head to work.

This is as taut and durable a line as I can string between the sensed object and the display.

Metonymy / surrogates

FIXTURE is an experiment about remote forms of presence. I made it because I’m thinking about the ways our phones/devices often serve as functional surrogates for our presence, and to how to expand, modulate, or isolate various parts of that relationship. A preliminary mapping is a logical first step, which is what you see here.

The primary signal is as described: simply, the accelerometer values sampled each minute. The secondary signals reside in the extrapolations made possible by the presentation of the data in this form, this fixture: A metronomic progression of orientations; a series of postures; a progression of states.

FIXTURE is an attempt to manifest the metonymy between smartphone and person - its output is a peripheral awareness of this taut line strung casually between two spaces.