LED Sculptures That Evolve with Changing Environmental Conditions

The LEDs quickly becoming the norm in lighting applications everywhere, it feels overdue that the medium is used in an artistic, thought-provoking context. Enter Echo, a series by artist Daniel Canogar, where his sculptures are turned into a real-time reflection of global events. The five pieces explored here by The Verge are called Troposphere, Ember, Basin, Magma, and Gust. Each explore a different area of our natural environment, and use light in various ways to showcase realtime changes to those respective areas. All of the sculptures are custom flexible LED panels that are attached to warped sheets of metal. Canogar chooses to leave the wires and ‘guts’ of the LEDs visible, perhaps to give more honesty to the materials. Really fascinating work.

The LED visuals on Troposphere (above) react in real time to air quality readings in a particular city — in this case, Washington D.C. The more the color orange is displayed, the more polluted the air; the more blue, the less pollution is present. The information is updated every five seconds, drawing data from five different reading stations in the D.C. area.

“My entire project as an artist is always about the impact that technology has on us,” Canogar told The Verge. “About how we communicate, how we see the world, how we experience ourselves and our bodies and how’s that’s constantly being shifted and modified.”

Ember displays visuals that are created by interpreting data from the number of uncontrolled fires burning around the world — which was approximately 3,500 at the last check, according to Canogar. The more fires burning, the faster the animation moves.

The source of data for Basin is rainfall from 195 capital cities around the globe. Basin reacts to this data by moving slowly when a small amount of rain is falling and speeding up when more rain is recorded.

The patterns displayed on Magma are created by drawing data from the volcanic activity of over 600 volcanos from around the world. Volcanic activity is rated between 1 (dormant) to 5 (full eruption). Every time a volcano changes its rating, the lights on the panels change accordingly.