One of Europe's tallest residential buildings at 509ft, this 50-storey building consists of two towers, the top of which are illuminated by external LED feature lighting. The LEDs form a series of asymmetrical patterns of intersecting horizontal and vertical strips across the top 5 storeys of each tower. Reflected in the water below and surmounting a signature restaurant and a 50th floor cocktail bar with panoramic views of London, the lighting serves to increase the aura of this world-class architecture, says the company.
Artistic Licence's award winning Colour-Tramp system was specified to control the LEDs because of its ability to map both buildings geographically on a control screen. This then enabled the lighting designer to literally paint coloured light across the building and to render videos of the area to be lit.
Colour-Tramp was designed specifically to handle the complexity of two and three dimensional lighting arrays and combines the concept of lighting control with a graphic editor. It also provides a full implementation of Remote Device Management (RDM) which allows Colour-Tramp to communicate with the lighting fixtures.
Colour-Tramp operates by outputting Art-Net, the public domain protocol developed by Artistic Licence which is now supported by over 100 manufacturers worldwide. Pan Peninsula's two towers are then linked via fibre optic cables which are used to distribute the Art-Net Ethernet signals between the two.All the LED dimmers in the installation operate on DMX512 so, in its first outing, Artistic Licence's newest product, Art-Lynx, was used in both buildings to convert the Art-Net signals to DMX512, ensuring seamless and precise control between Colour-Tramp and the LEDs.
Mounted in a DIN Rail housing, Art-Lynx is designed to work with other Artistic Licence DIN Rail products and is the perfect solution to integrate DMX equipment into large scale or permanent systems.
"In designing this product we wanted to keep installation engineers in mind, in addition to the functionality of the product itself," explains Artistic Licence technical director, Simon Hobday. "Since they generally understand Cat 5 cable better than DMX, it was a natural progression to fit an Art-Net Node into a box to create a DIN Rail unit. It is now possible to integrate a whole host of our DMX DIN Rail products to, for example, control relays, LEDs, and the like - alongside standard electrical DIN Rail installations."
In addition to the asymmetric feature lighting, the show also featured a count down to the Olympics on the side of Tower 1, which was composed of over 2000 pixels of Artistic Licence Pixi-Flex an LED colour mixer aimed at pixilated animation and video applications.
"This is exactly the kind of challenge we relish," says Artistic Licence managing director, Wayne Howell. "Our company is based on developing solutions for new technology and we have been able to supply a number of tools for this project to build a complete control system which exactly meets the requirements of this very exciting and challenging project."
(Claire Beeson)
