UK - A cloud hangs at Heathrow - but its silver lining shows itself in a remarkable display. This is Cloud, a 5m digital sculpture by art and design company Troika, in the atrium to British Airways luxury lounges at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Evocative of the technology used on old-fashioned travel information boards, 4638 flip-dots cover the surface, switching between black and silver.

A Pharos Lighting Playback Controller (LPC X) controls the continuous fluid motion, displaying dramatic geometric and organic patterns across the sculpture, generating stunning visual and audio effects.

Drivers for the mechanical switching were pre-designed to receive RS232 serial data rather than DMX, so Pharos developed and implemented a custom control protocol to allow seamless communication with the sculpture's RS232 flip-dot drivers. This then allowed Troika to utilise Pharos Designer software's pixel mapping and lighting media effects to create the animations of the Cloud.

(Jim Evans)


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