Back in 2017, I was commissioned by IB5k to design and build a “3d volumetric LED chandelier” for Verizon's booth at a trade show in Las Vegas. There wasn’t room or budget to do real 3d video capture, so I came up with a way to use two webcams to capture viewers' silhouettes, and translate those silhouettes into light – red on one side, white on the other. The silhouettes echo back in space, creating a kind of infinity-mirror effect. When nobody's present, the chandelier's custom software used the noise in ambient light to create a glittering blend of the two colors, beckoning attendees into the booth.

This was one of the first major installations I took on in my own studio; I oversaw everything from the concept through r&d, design, prototyping, fabricating, and installing. I wrote all the code myself, and built the whole thing with a small team in my tiny Brooklyn studio. A coworker drove the whole thing from New York to Las Vegas, where I flew in with a giant duffel bag of tools to stay up all night and install it, along with a few other smaller LED installations on the conference floor of the Venetian.

The piece was two meters tall, and used 36 custom-built LED tubes. Each tube had 60 pixels, for a total of 2,160 individual points of light. I made custom Max/MSP/Jitter software to map the live video feed into the physical shape of the chandelier, cascading images away from the viewer on each side.