As the size of the cells is reduced, it is hoped that the appearance of the surface of the sculpture will approach that of an arbitrarily-shaped color television screen, assuming that the color cells are light-transmitting cells. At this point, the colors of the primaries will tend to blend to form nearly continuous coloration of the surface. This is not to say that the surface of the sculpture will in general be uniformly glowing, although this possibility does exist.
The possibility to modify light reflected from the surface of the sculpture may be useful for viewing the work in ambient light. The model currently known for such a light-modifying device is possibly a liquid crystal cell. Such a cell, however, might be unduly fragile.
The model of a light-emitting diode surface coloration method is not well suited for viewing in ambient light. However, there is possible one interesting behavior which could be employed in the presentation of the sculpture in the absence of gallery lighting. This is to simulate in a computer model the lighting, shading and shadowing of the form the sculpture has assumed due a computer-modeled light source and apply this pattern of light to the surface of the sculpture via its LED readouts. This would indicate the presence in the gallery of an invisible light source which illuminates only the sculpture.
The abstract image of the external environment, constructed by a distributed array of colored light detector cells will be of a quality somewhere between the focused image on a light-sensitive detector array, like a video camera, and what one could achieve in a coherent light environment. It has been shown that a detector array at 30 elements per millimeter is adequate to capture, transmit and reconstruct optical holograms [9].
The image one is likely to see will be nearest to what one could imagine would be "seen" by a fly's eye-brain, however, it is the opinion of the artist that the actual nature of this image is much different from the modular-focal picture that we have traditionally seen as "simulated fly-vision". The author finds it much more likely that the neural-net connecting the optic cells in a fly's eye should reconstruct an image which approaches a faithful reproduction of the world as the number of cells increases.
Sound image reconstruction is a similar problem which in the limit could be a three-dimensional assimilation of a holographic image, similar to a multi-detector, phase-reconstructed sonar image.
A possible example of an interactive work employing the combination of infrared image construction and surface lighting simulation might be the following: Assume the sculpture can construct a spherical map of the infrared light reaching it from all directions, i.e., an image of its infrared environment. In this map, the silhouettes of viewers in the environment will be the primary features. If a single, outstretched hand can be identified in the image, then a virtual light source can be attached to that feature and its position tracked in order to make it appear as if the viewer is holding the invisible light source. The movements of the light source the viewer makes will be evident only on the surface of the sculpture. See Krueger [10] for more on image feature (hand) tracking systems.
3-D Kinetic cellular Automaton -- Copyright 1995 Stewart Dickson