Glasslands Gallery is not just a music venue - it's our favorite place to see a show in NYC. It's also space that's been known for the installation art and idiosyncrasies that set the tone and give the room a DIY loft feel.
Our installation at Glasslands is a distributed, modular design that uses common mailer tubes (treated for flame retardancy) to house over 300 RGB LEDs, individually addressable, passed through diffusion, and mounted in clusters about the venue.
In an attempt to speak to the warm, intimate feel of the space, the design deliberately destabilizes the stage / house dichotomy by spreading from the upstage wall all the way to the entrance of the venue. Because each tube is individually addressable, the system can can highlight the three downstage 'chandeliers' over the performers' heads, or the cluster over the house DJ position, even individual tubes peeking into the bathroom stalls, or can treat the whole room as one large canvas, passing shapes through the point-space like spotlights or stripes.
Driving the system is our custom software, refined through over a year of development and onsite testing. It's a dynamic set of high-level controls that allows house sound engineer (GL has no full time lighting guy) to direct the software based on the same subjective criteria used to describe music, or the feel of an interior, offering direction like 'darker, cooler colors, dimmer in the house, slower moving', freeing up the venue crew to focus on the task at hand while providing adjustable, appropriate, and dynamic looks with minimal intervention, whether through the onscreen interface and built-in LFOs, MIDI controls, or OSC over wireless.
AM owes huge thanks to the Glasslands owners Rami Haykal and Jake Rosenthal, staff Josh Thiel and Cameron Hulk, plus Eileen Tang, Trevor Hufnagel, Francisco Casablanca, Guillermo Echevarria, Dark Momino, Chuck Reina, and many more who gave countless hours to project, strictly on faith and love of tubes.
Made in Max.
Lighting Engineering: Jason Fellows
Avery Tare photos courtesy of Jason Bergman
Grid photo courtesy of Eileen Tang
Tubesoft uses the very awesome imp.dmx ArtNet library by David Butler.
