Illuminate members have been busy working away on a Light Installation for this year’s Light Night.
We have been inspired by the exhibition of drawings by Leonard da Vinci which will be showing at the Castle later this year. Finding out about the life and work of Leonardo made us want to explore our own inventiveness.
We particularly liked Leonardo’s inventions and ideas for flying machines and so started by looking at insects, butterflies wings and flying machines from our Access Artefact collection to come up with ideas of what we might create.
We decided to make our own hybrid insects and strange creatures to display in lit jam jars which will be hung around the Brewhouse Yard site, to add an extra dimension to this, Callum, our resident technology expert bought in a collection of motors, circuit boards and wires so we could attempt to make our creations move!
Creating our bug...
Taking a well earned break.
We had a lot of fun wiring up our models and then choosing how we would like each motor to move. Callum then did the hard part of programming each motor so we could create our menagerie of whirling and wiggling insects complete with LED light and the strange hum of the working motors.
We displayed our creations at Brewhouse Yard on the 5th Febuary and chatted to visitors about the work and the upcoming exhibition.
