Cool artwork made from 3,600 tiles of LCD glass

I was on a panel with the amazing multimedia artist Jeff Lieberman at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado earlier this month. His latest work (which he created in collaboration with SosoLimited and Hypersonic Engineering + Design) is called Patterned by Nature. Here's how he describes it.

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The artwork, a collaboration between Hypersonic Engineering & Design, Plebian Design, and Sosolimited, 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 3,600 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 (Thanks, Nirvan!)

• [show me]

  I want one!

• [Ito Kagehisa]

  Mad props to John Cope,  North Carolina Natural Sciences Xibits!

  Edit: Oops, John’s designing exhibits at the NC Museum of History, not the museum of Natural Sciences. How embarrassing. :(

• [garyg2]

  I try and avoid ‘awesome’ as an adjective due to its over/flippant use but that is genuinely, awesome.

  Makes me think, yeah, humans, they *can* do cool stuff.

• [oldtaku]

  It’s like using a TRS-80 again!

• [Andy Simmons]

  If nobody attempts to hijack this installation to play a gargantuan game of Tetris, I will be severely disappointed in humanity.

• [Michael Polo]

  Nice to see artists picking up new technologies, hope to see lots more of this in the future.

• [Matt Katz]

  This is so beautiful.  This new art is good.  And yet my first instinct is to productize this, to put it in shower doors

• [Nan Andrews]

  Reminds me of the eCloud by Dan Goods, Nik Hafermass and Aaron Koblin, at the San Jose Airport Terminal B.

• [BombBlastLightingWaltz]

  This is art? Well, one persons funded appellation is another persons eye sore. Considering the venue and financial backing, it would be callous to boo-hoo such a monstrosity. 

• [jimmykinkade]

  I can do an equally amazing thing with scotch tape and polarized sunglasses. 

• [Culturedropout]

  So _that’s_ what became of all of those awful old LCD overhead projector panels!