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| jarrin > Interests > Electronics > Embrace the Light | |
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Final Installation 2/17/2007 7:15 PMIn advance of the event I did as much as I possibly could. I went through all 38 of my light fixtures and made sure they all worked (which they didn't of course but I at least had time to fix some and mark others as inoperative). I also found a big piece of white fabric to hang in front of the lights which I had to cut in half and sew back together into a big 12' x 12' square. (With the lights off, you would see only the fabric and not the lights behind it; with the lights on the light would be somewhat diffused.) We weren't able to get in before the day of the event so I got to the space at 11a to begin installation (which I knew would take five or six hours). With the help of a few people (alis, pete, camo, arcana, others?) I first hung the back panel from some perfectly structurally sound piping and quickly realized that the ceilings in the space were not twenty feet, as I had foolishly assumed, but more like fourteen feet. That meant that instead of being mounted on the wall above people's heads as I had originally envisioned it my array covered the entire fucking wall. Oops. No matter! It was extremely foolish of me to not do the math on that. Science marches on. I then went up and down the 14' foot ladder (that my brother selflessly donated to our cause) a million times zip-tying light fixtures into their proscribed positions and attaching them to the pre-run and clearly marked cabling. If I hadn't pre-run all those cables it would have taken me another three hours to wire everything. Whew! I then went up and down that ladder a few more times to actually mount all of the fragile fluorescent tubes. Surprisingly not a single one broke or burnt out! Finally another few trips up and down and I had the sheet hung in front of the lights. I was a little bit worried about a short-circuit starting the adjacent sheet on fire. But only a little bit. I located a couple misbehaving fixtures; swapped them for good ones and the installation was finished. We turned off the lights in the warehouse, fired up the system and goddamn it was bright. Thirty-five twenty watt fluorescents, all on simultaneously, generates 700 watts of light. For reference, two standard four foot fluorescent tubes you typically see in offices or garages generate only eighty watts and they're usually sufficiently bright to illuminate quite a lot of space. Imagine almost nine of those pairs of lights in one small space and you begin to appreciate how bright it all was. No matter - it was time to go home, remove my engineer hat, chill out for a couple hours, put on my partying hat and then return to begin the night of hard trance. |
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