San Francisco's Bay Bridge is being transformed into the world's largest light sculpture, composed of 25,000 LEDs It's 1.8 miles of lights .

Source: thebaylights.org

Leo Villareal is sitting outside in the dark, hunched over his laptop. He’ll be sitting this way every night for the next three weeks. But he's not terribly focused on the glow in front of him. He's concentrating on the 25,000 individually programmed LED lights across the water, which make up the largest light sculpture in the world.

The LED artist and his team finished installing lights along the suspension cables spanning a 1.8 mile section of the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco and the East Bay, almost a month ago. (The lights are only on the West facing side and won't distract drivers.) Right now, he's tweaking the software algorithms that dictate the movement patterns of the lights, which will be on display for the next two years. He has until March 5, when the installation, the Bay Lights, officially opens.

Villareal's algorithms are inspired by the environment around the bridge — the currents, weather, wildlife, traffic from cars and boats. “I have been up on cable walks, but it is very much of a loose artist interpretation,” says Villareal, “I'm not literally using any sensors or making scientific visualizations. If you want to think of it from a technology perspective, as the artist, I am the sensor.”

One of the biggest challenges is making sure the Bay Lights work from every perspective — from the vantage point at the foot of the bridge or across the Bay in Sausalito. The final product will feature simultaneous layers of various sequences played in random order for a random amount of time. “You will never see the exact same progression twice,” explains Villareal. “You might recognize certain sets of patterns, but there is no beginning, middle, or end.”

“People ask me, why can't I just use a webcam. But a camera sensor can't document the subtleties you see with your eyes,” explains Villareal. “It's not about document of light but the impact of the light itself.”

Adrian Graham's video of the lights, which Villareal showed an audience at his San Francisco Museum of Modern Art lecture.

Source: vimeo.com

The $ 8 million dollar project is privately funded, mainly by the tech community, with whom Villareal has close ties. To Villareal, it’s the epitome of what the tech world is doing right now in the Bay Area: “It's a time when seemingly impossible things happen on daily basis.” He adds, “It's a new kind of thinking, that 'we are doing it and making it happen, and why not?' There is something bigger happening that is aligned with this.”

Villareal lives in New York, but his “formative moments” were in the Bay Area. In 1994, fresh out of graduate school at NYU, Villareal came out to Palo Alto, for a summer internship at Interval Research, a think tank funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “The web was brand new and getting fully immersed in lab like Interval was kind of like a fantasy place for someone interested in technology,”says Villareal. “It was a unique place that combined programmers engineers with designers, artists, musicians. It was very ahead of its time and a wonderful education for me just to just be absorbing all the energy and innovative thinking.”

But as you might expect from with a massive light installation in the Bay Area, it also started with Burning Man.

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With the future of reading heading squarely in the direction of electronic devices, what to do with the old timey book form? Build a lamp, of course. During a recent visit to the City by the Bay, we popped into the TechShop hackerspace and were introduced to Max Gunawan, the designer behind Lumio (not to be confused with a certain smartphone line of similar name). The product, developed in that very space, offers up a cool take on the desktop lamp, fitting it into a wooden, old timey-looking book form. Open it up and the pages fan out into what looks like a paper lantern.

It’s an LED light powered by a lithium ion battery that’ll give you around eight hours on a charge. Due to the foldable nature of the Lumio, the device is portable and can be opened into a number of configurations, to suit your needs. Gunawan is a couple of days away from launching a Kickstarter page for the project, in hopes of getting together $ 60,000. Interested funders will be able to pick one up for around $ 95 — wait for it to come to market, and that price will jump to around $ 125 or $ 135.

After the break, check out a video of Gunawan giving us the lowdown on Lumio.

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