My safecracking game from LACMA Halloween made an appearance at the December 2009 Mindshare event. It was installed on the rooftop of the Downtown Independent theater in Los Angeles with a great view of the skyline.
Since LACMA I re-engineered the door-release mechanism to be more powerful and reliable and it has worked like a charm since.The prize inside was a bowl of candycanes and mini Kit Kats and people enjoyed trying to crack it.
I was invited to show some projects at the LA County Museum of Art for their Muse Costume Ball, in conjunction with Mindshare Labs. We had an entire gallery in the Arts of America Building for the night and showed upwards of 15 interactive explorations.
I brought the Contours Laser Obelisk but also debuted a work-in-progress safecracking game called “Scrooge”.
“Scrooge” is a cabinet I built designed to look like a cartoony safe. It has a large dollar sign on top which serves as both a scoreboard for the game and an exagerrated symbol of the concept of a secure moneybox (a la Scrooge McDuck). The safe has both a front and back door that serves as the playing surface. Each player (red and blue) tries to open the safe by turning the dial to find the three unknown numbers in the combination. three LEDs on the door flash at varying speeds to indicate how close they are to the unknown number. The dollar sign on top shows lights for both players so everyone can see how close each player is to winning.
I once again showed the interactive laser project at Mindshare LA at Lot613 in Downtown Los Angeles.
This time it was contained inside the 6 foot tall Obelisk I constructed for DANCEiSM, with a new twist.
I added LED’s in the tip of the metal pyramid that houses the laser so that the obelisk is visible even if no one is interacting with it. The lights are white if no one is around but once but the camera finds someone the lights turn red instead. I cut up a broken piece of plastic from a ceiling light fixture to act as a light diffuser.
The LED’s are controlled by an Arduino receiving messages over serial from the camera program running on my laptop.
Here are more photos of the event:
Last night the laser was featured along side an impressive array of interactive multimedia projects at Mindshare LA. A crowd of over 400 expanded their views on new media and learned a bit about a wide range of topics from healthy eating to Guerilla improv.
Below are pics of the laser installation as well as some of other projects shown at August Mindshare. I am currently developing a large scale collaborative interactive game for a future Mindshare – more details to come!