44 glass cases containing life-like scale models of human misery. Each inhabited by an ant colony and equipped with a small HD camera.

In 44 minutes a very narrow beam of ‘daylight’ moves over all the cases, giving each one 1 minute of ‘daylight’. At the end the light turns off, moves to the beginning of the room and starts over.

During each glass case one minute of ‘daylight’ the live feed from the camera is projected on the back wall and a soundtrack for that location is played.

I was asked to create a system which could be easily started and gracefully stopped by the employees of the museum.

The main challenge was to sync the video, audio, light and motorized pully system. The system constantly checks the state and location of the motor to decide which video and audio should be active and if the light location should be corrected by slowing down or speeding up.

The system runs on a Raspberry Pi using Node.js. It uses two BlackMagic Videohubs and a videomixer to control the video. The audio is controlled through PureData