Adobe Lights—100 Artists at Work
Brainstorming
When we began brainstorming ideas for the Adobe Logo Remix project, we started by asking ourselves a couple of questions. What does Adobe mean to us? What role have their products played in our personal and professional lives? Coming out of this exercise, we all agreed that we loved the fact that their products empowered us to express our creativity and ideas.
The next question we explored was the following: as creative developers, technologists and makers, what can we build that will express how we feel?
We finally landed on the idea of figuring out a way to show creativity as it was happening in real time. That’s when we decided that we wanted to capture a single pixel from a group of artists as they worked on their creative projects and manifest it in some way. We also knew that we wanted to build an installation that included physical, digital and interactive aspects to it, aspects that could represent the wide range of talents, interests and skill sets within our team.
We wanted the idea to be expressed in a dynamic and exciting way and settled on the idea of building a large physical installation made up of 100 cubes of light, with each cube being assigned to a specific artist.
We would also need to create a small piece of software and give it to 100 artists to run on their computers. As each artist goes about their day doing their work, expressing their creativity through the software and tools on their computer, the software communicates with their cube in the installation and changes its color to represent the color of the pixel that’s directly under their mouse cursor. We would literally be showing creativity as it was happening.
Planning and Prototyping
We started planning and exploring what the completed installation might look like, how we’d build each cube and, importantly, which key technologies, hardware and software we’d need to bring to the project to make it work the way we wanted it to.
Production
Once we had solutions figured out for the design and materials we’d use to build each cube and how each cube would be lit and powered, we started building the full set of 100.
Testing the Cubes
Photographing the Completed Installation
We took the installation to a large, beautiful indoor space here in San Francisco, where we would have enough room and control over the lighting to let the cubes really shine.
3D Model of the Installation
Below is a working 3D model of the Adobe Lights installation we've created. Click the cubes below and discover the artists behind them. Note: In order to see the 3D model below you will need to be using web browser that supports WebGL (we recommend using Chrome).
Below is a working 3D model of the Adobe Lights installation we've created. Click the cubes below and discover the artists behind them. Note: In order to see the 3D model below you will need to be using web browser that supports WebGL (we recommend using Chrome).
The Future of The Project
We are in the process of setting up the Adobe Lights installation in the lobby of Adobe’s San Francisco office. The 100 artists who have signed up to be a part of the project will continue to share pixels from their work in progress with everyone who visits Adobe’s office.