Thoughts and Prayers

For an exposition highlighting the history of a historic manor in the Netherlands called Oud Amelisweerd we created an interactive installation out of electric votive candles that light up in the silhouette of the visitor.

Called Thoughts and Prayers, the installation refers to a part of the history of the house, when this specific room was used as the chapel for an order of friars. Over eighty friars lived in the house for several years after they were forced out of their own monastery because of the second World War.

Novices were trained at the manor in skills like woodworking and electrics, which gave us an interesting personal connection to this history while building the installation. From coming up with the idea to installing the finished piece in the house the whole thing took us about two weeks.

Thoughts and Prayers is a meditative installation that shows a candle-light reflection of the visitor in real-time, on an altar table filled with 240 votive candles. The warm, flickering candle light in the dim room, combined with the soothing sound of Gregorian chants gives the visitor a chance to slow down, breathe, and take a moment to literally reflect.

We rewired 240 LED candles, and connected them to 24 daisy-chained Adafruit PCA9685 boards, which we use to turn the candles on or off. We made a program in Max/MSP that uses a Kinect 3D camera to create a black and white silhouet of the visitor. The pixel information is then sent to an Arduino Uno which controls the adafruit boards and turns the candles on or off.