Rainbow ribbons danced effortlessly around her, as if in sync with her hypnotic gyrations. Fractal, multicolor patterns trailed like glowing gossamer from the plastic hula hoop that spun around her hips, legs, and arms, illuminating her body in the low evening light.
Even though this was happening at an outdoor electronic dance music festival, this wasn’t a drug-induced hallucination, mind you, but a cutting-edge prototype. Scott Miller, a local entrepreneur and owner of Santa Maria-based tech business Argent Data Systems, had just finished a beta version of his “smart LED hoop,” the Hyperion Hoop, and handed it to the first hoop dancer he saw at the Lucidity Festival a few years ago.
This hoop was unlike any LED hula hoop on the market at the time, Miller explained, as he had equipped it with motion sensors that allowed the programmable LED strip in the hoop to react in real time to the movements of the performer and its location in space.
“She had never seen a motion-sensing hoop before and she just went nuts with the thing,” he said. “She looked like the Bohr’s model of an atom with the electrons spinning around. You couldn’t see the hoop in the dark, you could only see this swarm of green and blue lights going around in coherent patterns.”
Miller has been selling his Hyperion Hoop for two years now, and has been working constantly to meet the demand of both professional performers and amateur hoop dancers who want his smart hoop. But his product is just one in an explosion of items made available over recent years that include simple and complex concatenations of LEDs, from single-colored LED clips to toys like Miller’s, which use programmable LED strips or grids to make an interactive light experience.
The popularity of LED—which stands for “light emitting diode”—items can be traced to the electronic dance music (EDM) movement, raves, and the transformational festival circuit that includes big names like Burning Man and smaller events like the Lucidity Festival, which kicks into gear the weekend of April 8 through 10 this year at Cachuma Lake’s Live Oak Campground. Events like Lucidity don’t just include audiences glittering with the colorful LEDs, but also feature stage sets that incorporate the technology in undulating lightscapes that move with the music.
HELIANTHUS ENORMAE – THE GIANT LUMINOUS SUNFLOWER FROM PHOTONIC BLISS ON VIMEO.
USED BY PERMISSION COURTESY OF BRIAN PINKHAM.
Glow with the flow
Flow arts are quite old, with some originating in indigenous dance or martial arts forms. Poi for instance—a flow art featuring tethered weights that are swung from fabric or chords—began with the Maori tribe of New Zealand, who often set the weights on fire for an added effect. Of course, LED poi are available on the market today—they’re multicolored with the added plus side of being less dangerous than fire—but LEDs have found a way into other flow arts as well.
Juggling, hoop dancing, staff spinning, contact juggling, and other forms have all been tricked out with LEDs as the art forms experienced a resurgence in the United States, explained Ryan Williams, a coordinator with the Lucidity Festival who is also a flow arts performer and teacher. These forms allow attendees to engage in a performance, Williams explained, as they become part of the creative arch of the moment.
“I think there’s something going on at a deeper level, and the reason you see flow arts and things like juggling coming back is because the United States is a country that has a lack of circus culture compared to other countries, or how it was in the past. And I think we’re seeing a swing back in that direction,” Williams said. “A lot of these movement arts have been with us a long time, and the object manipulation subcategory is becoming more popular now as a form of expression for a generation of people.”
The fun of flow arts is an inspiration to many, but the allure of LED lights is another thing all together.
One local flow artist—unaffiliated with Lucidity or any product—named Nick McDonald, enjoys Poi and rope dart spinning, but his main obsession is gloving. Gloving is a hand-based flow art that uses LED clips or special gloves to create a light show with a combination of finger, hand, and arm movements. For him, the LED isn’t a necessary part of hand flowing, but it certainly elevates the art into another strata.
“The appeal is definitely the color, and the tracers are cool,” McDonald said. “And LEDs are just ingrained in my brain since birth I think; you can watch LEDs on your VCR in your living room or on your video game controller, so I think there’s like a weird obsession with LEDs that people have.”
With the resurgence of EDM, which has seeped through much of contemporary pop music, the colorful accoutrement came along with it. But the demand for more—more options, more complexity, more color—has fueled the endeavors of entrepreneurs and artists who use LEDs.
Coding creatively
Miller began attending Burning Man almost seven years ago. That’s where he witnessed the collision of visual arts, flow arts, and the various technological toys that used LEDs. Ever since LED technology became more affordable in the early 2000s, the popularity of LED products has steadily risen, he said.
At the time, almost all of the LED hoops on the market included colorful patterns and tracers but nothing interactive, he said. It was just a hoop with colorful lights inside. Miller envisioned something more and began experimenting with addressable LED strips and motion sensing technology for hoops.
“When I started doing this, none of them reacted to what you were doing, they didn’t have the ability to be choreographed, and the hoops were just doing their own thing,” he said. “One of the big things we’re really trying to do is give the performer the tools to really add to their performance, not just a gimmick, but to add some other dimension to it.”
The motion sensors in the Hyperion Hoop are equipped with accelerometers that measure linear acceleration, angular rate gyros that measure rotation rate, and magnetometers that measure the Earth’s magnetic field like a compass, Miller explained. Three of these devices are situated at 90-degree angles, giving complete X, Y, and Z axes, so the hoop collects a full data set of its location in space, and depending on the effect or pattern currently equipped, can react to even the slightest movements.
Some settings allow a spinning hoop’s lights to stay in one place, whereas others send tracers along the rim of the hoop at a rate variable to the speed of the hoop’s rotation. Most impressive are the Hyperion Hoop’s “persistence of image” effects, which call on the motion sensors, the incredible speed with which the LEDs can change color, and the hoop’s onboard processing power. As the hoop moves in any direction, the motion sensors guide the rate of change in the reel of LEDs inside, which trace an image through the air as the human brain computes all the photonic data bombarding the eye’s retina.
“It’s like watching a film projection where you have a sequence of still images but your brain fills in the gaps,” Miller said. “So you have an afterimage effect because the hoop is moving and it’s displaying 240 lines per second, so each time the hoop has moved it presents another line of the image.”
Miller’s hoop comes preloaded with colorful patterns as well as more distinct images, such as the white and red mushroom from Mario Brothers or the face of beloved characters like Elmo or SpongeBob SquarePants. But users can also upload their own images into the hoop via its USB flash drive created with programs as simple as Microsoft Paint or as refined as Adobe Photoshop. There are also wireless hookups that interface with professional theater lighting controls, so one or more hoops can be choreographed and manipulated by a lighting designer.
At the Lucidity Festival each year, audiences are glowing with numerous gadgets and they congregate around various stages, which are spectacles unto themselves. These stages house DJs or live bands, and are bedazzled in LEDs, LCD screens, and one-of-a-kind sculptures melded with luminescent technology.
The organizers of Lucidity contract out stage and lighting design for their performance spaces each year to well-known installation artists. One such company is PhotonicBliss Interactive Art, the brainchild of artist Brian Pinkham, who collaborated with Audiowaska Productions on the live stage at Lucidity last year.
Audiowaska’s Randell Lamontagne designed the stage, and Pinkham came in with his lighting experience to trick out the forest-inspired set with his programmable LEDs.
“They had a very natural sculpture-type aesthetic, and the lighting I did sort of created an extra layer of dynamic,” Pinkham said. “Because their aesthetic was so organic and natural feeling, the lighting was very internal, like a mythical creature that was glowing from the core, from within itself.”
Many of Pinkham’s installation pieces follow the same principle he aimed for in Lucidity’s live stage. The thousands of addressable LEDs he equipped to Audiowaska’s stage design weren’t fixed in plain sight, but rather hidden, so that most of the lighting effects reflected off of the towering stage sculpture.
Pinkham used his coding experience to create a seamlessly flowing color palette that imbued the stage with its own character. In this way, he explained, the LEDs add a whole other dimension of experience to the stage.
“It kind of follows from this paradigm from Arthur C. Clarke, who said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” Pinkham said. “And that’s our inspiration as to why you shouldn’t be able to see any of the wires or circuits or lights; it helps suspend disbelief.”
Festival of light
Hundreds of music fans, dancers, artists, flow performers, and more will descend on the Lucidity Festival this year with their techno gear in tow. They’ll enjoy live bands, electronic music DJs, and even silent concerts—stage performances where listeners hear the music via wireless headphones only.
The theme of Lucidity is transformational arts and music that bring attendees into the creative sphere with the hired talent. This is directly inspired by the flow arts, explained Williams, who said that several of the founders of Lucidity were fire spinners and flow artists such as himself.
“Lucidity very much values personal awakening, personal development, and providing a safe space for people to go and discover a part of them that maybe they didn’t know about, and help them discover that and then go spread it out into the society, which to us is a net gain,” Williams said. “The flow arts, personally for me, turned my life around completely 180 degrees to what I know it will be for the rest of my life.”
The freedom to explore one’s self is a necessity for these art forms to flourish, he said, and self-exploration paired with expression is a founding tenant of Lucidity and other transformational art festivals.
The idea of acceptance and inclusion has permeated the EDM, rave, and festival circuit for decades, gloving enthusiast McDonald explained. The idea of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect) is what’s allowed so many to discover their love and eventual aptitude for the movements of gloving or hooping, which might be seen as superficially silly, but that deliver a serious dose of joy and edification, he said.
“You can get into something and manipulate it into what you want at will, and with gloving, you’re using your fingers and you can do anything you set your mind to,” McDonald said. “When I watch someone giving a light show, it’s like I can see their mind and where they’re at in the thought process.”
For entrepreneurs like Hyperion Hoop’s Miller—who is used to making hardware and programming weather-tracking software—becoming involved with the flow arts and the festival scene through his product is a welcome change of pace for him to use his technical knowhow and make something creative.
The payoff really comes when he sees performers take his hoop to new heights that he didn’t think of, Miller explained, whether imbedding new patterns in it or creating colorful spectacles with multiple hoops at once.
“I’m a programmer, and I’ve got all kinds of different ideas for the hoops, but compared to the creative ideas of thousands of customers, they’re always going to come up with stuff that I haven’t,” he said. “It’s just been a really fun change of pace to do this entirely different thing that uses a lot of my same skill set, but is also another underexplored realm, and it’s been fun to work on an entertainment-related product and really see people get enjoyment out of it.”
Scott Miller used his tech wizardry to recover interviews from a broken recording device for Arts Editor Joe Payne’s last cover story. Send comments to jpayne@santamariasun.com.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SCOTT MILLER/ARGENT DATA SYSTEMS
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2016.