Brian Goggin
"Photogenesis"
Permanent site-specific sculpture for North SeaTac Park, King County, WA.
1999

Brian wanted to create a sense of life in the lights atop these tall tree-like sculptural street lights.
He asked me to design dimmer circuits for each lamp that would slowly fade the colored
lights up and down over periods ranging from 7 to 20 seconds for different lamps.
The colors are yellow, blue and red.

The electronics that I designed were housed in a weatherproof gasketed enclosure that
was installed in the base of each light.

The dimmer is controlled by a PIC12C672 microcontroller chip that I programmed
to create timed dimming cycles.

I also designed the lamp system that fits inside the white enclosure of the light.
Since 300 watt colored lamps are not available, I decided to use 12 separate
25 Watt lamps that are readily available from a hardware store.  I built a structure
from copper pipe that supports all 12 lamps in an even layout that fills the housing.
Having this many lamps gives the light a "graceful failure mode" - meaning that
if a few lamps burn out it won't be very noticeable.  SeaTac maintenance staff
did not want to have to replace these lamps more often than once a year!

(Note 6 years later the lamps are still working perfectly without needing replacement
after running every night!)

See more of Brian's work on his web site.

email Brian Goggin

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