Leo Villareal – Cellular light communication

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Multiverse – Leo Villareal

The inherent need to decode and make meaning from patterns in systems is utilised to the max in Leo Villareal’s light works which most recently have be controlled by computational systems. Pattern recognition heads, myself one, will have a field day perusing the work and ideas of this Albuquerque based light sculptor. Using Cellular Automata systems, including our favorite, Conway’s Game of Life, to control LEDs he produces massive, visually complex works such as Origin. Origin is a large matrix of lights programmed to produce patterns that mimic ones that are more familiar to us in the real world, swarming and flocking behavior, for example. They also have the appearance of large control panels, not dissimilar to the kind of pulsing control grid that Lt Uhura spent much of her time attached to. The connection with outer space continues…. Sarah Lingus makes the analogy between Villareal’s work and the contact epiphany found in Close Encounters and referenced in other mystico Sci-fi’ films such as Solaris and 2001. There is certainly something alluring in these intelligible animations and the implications of sapience/sentience they provide in their ‘communication’.

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