Regenesis Seed

For Playa del Fuego '25 I had the pleasure of helping construct the temple to burn on Sunday night. I was tasked with some general SVG design work for the CNC routing on the leaves as well as lighting for the installation. 

For the lighting I used 10 sets of LED strips running in parallel on each leg of the body. I was able to use a single data feed to power all of the strips as we wanted a sort of "pulsing" effect. I wrote a couple custom effects in C++ that ran on an Arduino. The idea was to have it begin as a slow color sweep with a fiery color palette, and when someone touched the metal plate it would red pulse the lights to match their own pulse. I tried a few different pulse sensing modules but wasn't able to get consistent readings without prolonged exposure to the skin with precise pressure, therefore I simply used an average pulse reading with slight variations based off of sensor readings. Unfortunately the pulse effect wasn't included in the end due to the metal touch object not coming in time.

For external lighting of the temple I simply threw together some solar lights on long posts. The posts were necessary to prevent unwanted large shadows caused by the leaves.

The end result was stunning and the temple burned beautifully! Thanks Trevor Clifford for bringing me on to be a part of the team!