When we walked in to set up at Day For Night Festival in Houston, we found a huge installation of red lasers covering several hundred feet of the second floor of the Barbara Jordan Post Office. I knew that this was the activation of “Tundra”, and I soon figured out that the group from Russian that conceived of the installation was called “Tundra”… the actual installation was called “Outlines”.
I had kind of expected something like this; I had been working with Day For Night organizers to be sure that they had the lasers for this installation, and they were running into some unspecified problems importing the lasers from Russia to arrive in time for the festival. The specs that I had seen called for 400 80mW lasers at 650 nm red and asscociated mounts. I had lined up a local supplier just in case they did not arrive, but they arrived!
I think that they ended up using 252 red lasers, all spread out evenly in an array across the floor shooting vertically, and then each column had four lasers shooting horizontally across to the opposite column.
Each laser had its own control line so they could all be individually controlled, and control them they did! “Outlines” was constantly shifting and changing along with a great soundtrack.
Here are some pictures of the setup, in anaglyph 3D (go find your red/cyan 3D glasses!)
