Patterned by Nature

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (naturalsciences.org) for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.

The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.

An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.

Patterned by Nature was created by 
Plebian Design – plebiandesign.com
Hypersonic Design & Engineering – hypersoniced.com
Patten Studio – pattenstudio.com
and 
Sosolimited – sosolimited.com

Filed under: art — by adafruit, posted April 30, 2012 at 11:53 am


Try Adafruit's new iPhone & iPad app for makers! Circuit Playground! "Incredibly handy for anyone working in electronics. Perfect for engineers and non-engineers alike."
Looking for engineers, makers and the builders of dreams? Try our Adafruit job boards.
Join our weekly Adafruit SHOW-AND-TELL at 9:30pm ET every Saturday night! Then at 10pm, ASK-AN-ENGINEER with Ladyada and the Adafruit team!

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

www.flickr.com
adafruit's items Go to adafruit's photostream
www.flickr.com
items in Adafruits More in Adafruits pool