"Alien Egg" Sculpture

I built this sculpture for an exhibition of artwork by Yale college seniors. I had no prior experience with any of the materials I used - I had never made anything with clay, and more technically challenging, I had never built a physical circuit before or had any experience with Arduinos.

I went into the project a bit unsure of what I was going to build, but after a few sessions at the pottery studio, and several all-nighters at the maker-space on campus, the project started to take literal and conceptual shape.

What I ended up making was a small clay vessel, about the size of a football, with many holes along the surface. I crammed a bunch of LED strips inside, connected via an Arduino circuit to an ultrasonic sensor.

I placed the sculpture on a pedestal, tucked away under the staircase in one of the showrooms of the gallery. As members of the audience approached the sculpture, the ultrasonic sensor would read the distance to the nearest person. This information was fed through the circuit such that as people approached the sculpture, the LED strips would shine brighter, and as they moved away, the lights would dim.