I attended Leo Villareal's exhibition of Animating Light with Elliott at the Nevada Museum of Art. When Elliott told me that a friend of his that worked there told him that Villareal first had the idea to make the light sculptures after he got lost in the desert at Burning Man I couldn't stop laughing and knew I had to go see the show. Knowing only that the show involved lights, I was excited to see how he used them and was very impressed as soon as I walked into the museum. His piece entitled Star blinked and pulsated over my head almost instantly and I could see how his work was a direct influence of his experience at Burning Man.
Of all his different pieces at the show, my favorite was Diamond Sea. The way the lights moved across the grid and the interplay of them with reflections off the mirror made it hard for me to take my eyes off it. With the mirror involved, it made the me and the other people looking at it a part of the piece while the lights did their own thing.
My first experience with programming anything was in my CS281 class this semester and I realized how much work the coding of Villareal's work must have taken him. Every different piece uses different code and they all work so well, both together in the exhibit and as individual works. Its really amazing that something which started out as a functional idea can turn into such an original and beautiful collection of work and still hold its own at a place like Burning Man where it was originally conceived.
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