GeoLeds

GeoLeds is an realtime location-based LED sculpture project developed from GPS technology in TCM Iceland Workshop and electronics experiment from my previos project TeleCart.

It reconstructs and reveals my experience during the workshop in Iceland towards her special nature, i.e weather, duration of daylight in summer, natural resources, etc. The artwork made with numerous LEDs flashing patterns. Those patterns in dot-matrix style showing maps by various different cartographic methods such as temperature, active rift regions, glacier region, political boundary, etc. The alteration of both latitude and longitude streaming from a server drives the switching from pattern to pattern.

Since the nature of flashing LEDs create a sense of vagueness, it challenges people's recognition of patterns, hence it constructs a in-the-edge of chaos experience and sense of timeless-ness.

It also enhances the medium specifity of locative media using GPS technology as an art interface. Unlike other locative-based artwork transforms or visualise data on a 2D screeen, GeoLeds is a sculpture exists in physical space. It emphasis the exploration of geographical location and physical space as an interface.

Technics
The project mainly consist of 4 physical parts, the bluetooth-enabled GPS receiver, the database server streaming the data, a Mac PowerBook G4 and the LEDs sculpture with microcomputer.

A bluetooth-enabled GPS receiver receives the latitude, longitude of the user's current position. It sends the data to the server via GPRS-enabled mobile phone which is connected to the Internet.

The databsed streaming server both receiving and sending those GPS data at the same time. A Mac PowerBook G4 receiving those streaming data via TCP network protocol. The PowerBook runs a customised program written in Pure Data. My program receives the streaming data.

Meanwhile it sends the processed streaming data to the microcomputer. The microcomputer runs my program written in PBASIC programming language decodes the processed streaming data and lights the LEDs with my designed patterns