DIY LCD Panels
My department opened its first show in the history of RISD on November 21st and I was one of the four people who designed it. As such, it sucked the marrow out of my bones and the time out of my days and has left me a ghost.
Part of the task was to figure out how to display digital works along-side more typical pieces like models and drawings. Our process is very fluid in its movement between digital and physical modeling so it became important for us to make little distinction, thus it was decided that the digital work should hang in a way similar to the drawings. This is the panel that I designed to accomodate the work. Once the prototype was built and debugged it was a mad dash to get four panels fabricated while all the other aspects of the show were worked out as well.
Each unit consists of a 18"x36" piece of clear plexiglass with a flush-mounted 4" LCD screen and a surface mounted DVD player. The DVD players were then hidden behind a frosted plexiglass panel to minimize the visual distraction but still let you see how the thing is working internally. Bud Saggal of Precision Laser in Cranston, RI graciously laser cut the panels to my specifications which ensured that everything was, well, precise. Lesson learned with the DVD players: cheapo machines are easy to take apart but don't like to play in a vertical position. More expensive machines will play vertical just fine but are much better constructed and far more time consuming to disassemble.
Although the screens are only 4" across the diagonal they proved to be fine for displaying the computer renderings and animations we needed to show. Since there are four of these panels throughout the show but we didn't know which video loops needed to go on which screens, I created a DVD with the four loops and a menu to choose which one you would like to start. Once a loop is selected it will run indefinitely and not show the menu again. This allowed us to change the content of the panels without physically moving them or even having to switch the discs around.
The aspect of this project that I enjoyed most was the detailing of the panels. This is a detail of the connection between the hanging cable and the panel itself. Instead of looping the cable through the hole we have secured it by using two wingnuts to pinch the wire into the hole. The wingnuts on each panel have then been alternated to create this propeller pattern.
Throughout the show we attempted to mix a vocabulary of refinement and roughness. The drawing frames which we designed and fabricated ourselves continue this dialog, but I'll save that for a later post when I have more photographs to illustrate my point.
--Posted 12/04/02 01:47AM