Fade Away performs a twitter search for the term “fade away” and uses an ultra violet laser diode to write these tweets on a phosphorescent surface. Each character has been programmed into an Arduino microcontroller, which controls the servo motors and the laser.
Full Description
Fade Away's frame is constructed of aluminum beams and holds a phosphorescent vinyl panel. Attached to the front beams are two high resolution digital servos, which are outfitted with machined aluminum brackets to form a pan and tilt head to hold the ultra violet laser diode. The servos and the laser are connected to an Arduino, which can operate autonomously with an Ethernet Shield or XBee wireless module. Fade Away can also work in "slave mode," in which it prints characters fed to it by a computer. The entire character set was manually programmed stroke by stroke and the imperfections in the characters come from the mechanics and code.
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2011
- Submitted to ArtBase: Monday May 7th, 2012
- Original Url: http://mattrichardson.com/Fade-Away/
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Work Credits:
- MattRichardson, primary creator
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Artist Statement
Some people say that what you put on the internet never goes away. Perhaps it’s just a cautious way of thinking about what you upload, but in reality, things really do fade away. And if a particular datum isn’t ever completely eradicated in your lifetime, it gets diluted among the huge amount of data that get uploaded everyday.