These days, when Atlanta-based artist Eddie Farr sees a flock of birds high in the sky merging into formation, or the ripples of a pebble thrown in a pond, or the swirl of a floating leaf in the breeze, he sees data points he can use in his electronic art. The sharp-minded, tech-savvy artist utilizes large data sets to program LED lights, which he then embeds into structures.
Take, for example, a recent work Farr created based on the Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The piece emulated water drops sliding down a surface. To create the data set, Farr dropped water on an angled surface, recorded the time and distance it would go based on its viscosity, then used the information to program a set of lights in sequence so that it looked like a raindrop falling.
