As with most of my ideas, they start with an “epiphany” which is shortly followed by a doodle and from there, it is anyones guess in which direction it will go.
I found this doodle from the time when I was first thinking about the idea.
The Art in impenetrable box idea requires a number of compontents:
- A box
- Gizmos to live in the box (lights, small computer, whizzy thing, etc.)
- A way to communicate with it
- A way to retrieve the images and display them to the world!
I made the first box out of cardboard and used a Raspberry PI 4B to manage the camera using a little python script. The script talked to a Arduino which in turn switched on lights and later rotated a small platform on which the art was mounted (a drawing mannequin in this case).
Below you can see the end to end process operational. On the left is the box with PI mounted on it, and to the right you can see the images being captured to a mounted drive on our remote curator system.
Once the above tests were complete, I set about getting a box made… a real one or a much “realer” one than the cardboard beer box I started with!
To do this I asked my neighbour Raymond (who happens to be a very talented artist) to create the first box for me. He was kind enough to provide a small alien figure which I am calling “Reaching for the Stars” as our first work of Art to replace my drawing Mannequin!
At this moment in time, I have yet to add the electronics.