I collaborated with artist Ron Longsdorf to create a simulated sunrise for his piece, I saw our future that day. A sensor recognizes when someone has entered the gallery and triggers the grid of 20 floodlights behind the piece to activate in a radial gradient, increasing in intensity over a period of several minutes.

Technical Details
A PIR sensor is attached to Arduino to sense changes in the IR radiation in the gallery. Max/MSP on a Mac Mini monitors the serial port to which Arduino is connected. Once triggered, Max/MSP runs a dimming patch and uses the dmxusbpro plugin to send commands to the dimmer packs. An ENTEC USB Pro box adapts the USB output to DMX protocol. This setup could potentially have been accomplished with less hardware, but time limitations required the use of proven, off-the-shelf equipment.

Thanks go to artist Ashley Pigford for his help with the Max/MSP patch.