Discover this curious triad of benches, nestled within a beautiful roundwood structure. Take a seat, and experience a hypnotic light show spring to life around you.
Bemusical Chairs premiered at the Enchanted Woods at Shambala Festival, and was then shown at The Open Market as part of Brighton Digital Festival 2016.
After two weeks at The Open Market
Close-up with green LEDs
Bemusical Chairs from above
Making the signs, lunchtime at Pavillion Gardens
The first people at our Open Market installation
Finished the Open Market BDF2016 build
Soph during the Open Market build
Temporary Sign
Monday morning, we left no trace (apart from hay)
Taking it down is so much quicker!
Sunday night, 9pm
Sunday lunchtime at Shambala
Sunday lunchtime, from a distance
Trying to guess how the lights work
Midnight on Friday
Bemusical Chairs fully lit
Friday night, around 10:45
Beth and Rich just before the woods opened
Rich upgrades the microcontroller software
Finished the build, getting organised
Before the fabric was added
Testing the EL wire
Starting the build at Shambala Festival
Will installs the light sensors
RGB Light Tests
Dave with lit-up arch
Andy finishes the last seat
Fitting LEDs into logs
The PolyStretch fabric arrives
EL wire sign complete
Felix on his mini router
Beth drills some side holes
Rich drills some end holes
Priscilla weaves the EL wire sign
The Open Market / BDF event is up
Anthony inserts a light-pipe
Rich tests one of the three arches
Tightening a bolt to tension the internal steel cable
An arch laid out, just before tensioning
Cable running through logs, ready to arrange
Drilling end-plates to tension against
The laser cut end-plates arrive from Cirrus Laser
Jig for drilling central-holes
Chop-saw style!
Matt in the dustsheet-zone
Marked-up, ready for cutting
Prototype laser-cut end plates, with RGB cables
Soph tests some M20 tensioning-rod
The first batch of LED spirals
Drilling through a pole without a jig
Rich and Priscilla prototype the end-plates
An early test — embedding LEDs into a log
Taken delivery of 80 Sweet Chestnut poles
Early version of the central-hole jig
Beth at a planning meeting
Final design for the structure, in acrylic
Early idea for the structure, in cardboard
Building an early proof-of-concept
This project is presented by Loop.Coop, a loose cooperative of artists, programmers, musicians and inventors based in Brighton. We make colourful things which straddle the real world and the digital domain, for people to play with and use creatively.
We are committed to using resources in a responsible and ethical way, and we’ve tried to minimise the environmental impact of this project at every stage. We have reused many materials from previous projects, and used ethically sourced sweet chestnut from local sustainably coppiced woodland for the structure.