Illuminated Betta Fish - Luminata 2022
We love Fremont Arts Council. They host a celebration for the changing of each season. For the Fall Equinox we celebrate Luminata with them.
For Luminata 2022, Haus Anima created an Interactive Illuminated Betta Fish Sculpture
BettaFish is an interactive sculpture featuring touch sensitive scales that change the LED light patterns and ambient music. Creating the Betta Fish took around two months of concentrated work.
Photo album from Luminata 2022 this contains the same photos from this blog without all the notes included within.
A visual journey following Haus Anima's two month effort transforming
into
Loren & Kalesta created the physical frame of the BettaFish from over 300 feet of wire
The tail was initially separate wire pieces but this turned out to be unstable so it was changed to 7 “loops” of wire.
The final wire design.
We 3D printed a dozen prototype scale patterns and tested them to see which looked and felt the best. We were inspired by a hexagon dress we saw at the Pacific Science Center and copied their technique of printing a few layers, inserting a sheet of tulle (or garden netting) then printing a few more layers so that the fabric is “encased” by the 3D print.
The 3D printer can print roughly a “panel” of 5x6 scales at a time. Each panel starts with 3 layers of transparent filament then switches to 2-4 layers of blue filament to get scales that are different levels of transparent.
Loren placing and gluing down the 18 individual panels of 3D printed scale
Inside the fish is a Raspberry Pi + a custom PCB with an ESP32. Zhigalka designed the PCB for a previous LED light projects. The RPi runs circuitpython (shout out to Adafruit!) and uses an mpr121 for the touch sensors on the music scales
Tweaking the touch sensors and preparing for final assemble
Eight tracks of music was provided by Lilac. Four played in the background, see our Youtube video, and four were controlled by the touch sensitive scales. Lilac also did costuming (see the last photos)
The final two days were a sprint to finish before the event and we didn’t get time to capture the scales being glued down, the fish being stuffed with bubble wrap and polyfill, or us frantically setting up in the final moments of sunlight
Lilac and Kelley, in a sneak peak at future art, have been working on Hades costumes.
An hour before the event we finished the BettaFish. We rushed to the event and got everything setup just in time!
Thanks for reading about our project!
We hope to it inspires you to make art 💕🎨 and if you live in Seattle we hope to see you a future event.
