The Seventh Gate

Sapta Dvāra is Darrel Ansted's piece. I designed the lighting.

The centerpiece is a twenty-foot stupa you can climb, ringed by arches of LED light. Around it stand six wishbone gates that sense participants approaching and answer them. Darrel describes it as "the mythic act of walking through light to awaken inner truth" — a corridor that is quiet presence by day and radiant color by night.

Underneath that: 2,500 LEDs on eight channels of 12V WS2815, driven by Chromatic through an Advantech controller and a wiring harness and power distribution system we designed and built. The six gates run separately on Quinn DigiNext2 controllers, each with a proximity sensor that trips a flash-bulb effect as someone passes.

This was the first power distribution system I had designed myself, which meant working out the runs, where power needed injecting along them, and how injection actually behaves across a long LED installation. It was also my first time with Chromatic, and the interesting thing about it is how much control it hands back to whoever is running the show — you are not obliged to pre-program every pattern in code before the piece exists.