This phase of my research has me delving into the completely novel world of Arduinos, elementary electrical engineering, and C+ coding. This branch of research and autodidacticism came out of a desire to not merely compile research on the queer percussiveness of club lighting but to create a kind of recipe book for DIY lighting for underground nightlife collectives to achieve nuanced control of lighting on a budget. A lighting control board and industry-standard equipment can cost several thousand dollars for the most basic of setup. I aim to develop an easily built DIY lighting controller that is both cost-effective and provides a certain granularity of control that will allow it to be played as a kind of percussive instrument.
The two images above show an experiment where a 1 meter 144 LED/m addressable LEDs strip (without its diffuser covering tube) is programmed to repeatedly send out a ‘moving dot’ from one end of the strip to another. The three sliding potentiometers control the speed of the dot’s movement, the brightness of the dot, and the RGB color of the dot. I wanted to control the speed of the dot’s movement by tap tempo (where you tap out the BPM manually and that value determines when the amount of time it takes to complete one cycle of movement), but was having issues with the code. I aim to also experiment with developing a Raspberry Pi controller with a DMX shield that can control the LED strips and other lights through the more theatre/club-standard DMX communication.