Hackers à La Délivrance: The Untold Story of How HeatSync Labs Saved Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Festival

Editor's Note: As part of my position as Editor at HeatSync Labs, I get to put on a reporter hat and take the spotlight of the Information Super Highway on our local Arizona makers, hackers, and tinkerers. If you or anyone you know is building something pretty awesome and they're within driving distance, leave a comment and I'll see if I can follow up on it. This $timeFrame's featured maker is Sean Hillmeyer, who, along with other volunteers, helped build and operate D A Therrein's 4 Letter Word Machine, featured at the 2009 Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto.  He also helped me in writing/editing this piece.

Photo by Sean Hillmeyer. All rights reserved.

HeatSync Labs has been an active participant in the local community since its inception, bringing together crowds of engineers and artists that would never otherwise have met.  As early as September, a mere month after our first meeting at the Mesa F.O.P. Lodge, we were visited by Margaret Bruning, a production manager for the Beatiful Light project.  She was invited to speak after receiving an email from D A Therrien, a locally based, but globally connected artist who masterminded the 4 Letter Word Machine, which had then only existed as a smaller-but-still-able-to-ruin-your-day-if-it-fell-on-you prototype, making its debut over the Arizona canal in downtown Scottsdale in January 2009.

Having established a successful show in Scottsdale, Therrien was commissioned to build a version of the 4 Letter Word Machine for the Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto, Canada.  Nuit Blanche is French for "White Night," an annual all-night art festival that has spread from France to other parts of Europe and Europey countries; Its essentially like First Friday art walks in American cities, but bigger, brighter, and all night long.

The second installation would require a larger, more powerful display that would need to be transported to Toronto and subject to the scrutiny of Canada's CE regulations as well as its seemingly perpetual cold and windy weather.  It would have to be bigger, stronger, and more modular.  It would also have to be built in time for Toronto's Nuit Blanche festival in October, where it was to be suspended above Toronto city hall.  Time was of the essence, and volunteers were urgently needed.

Five volunteers from HeatSync Labs, along with David's and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Arts (SMOCA)'s own crew and volunteers spent a week and a half of their time soldering, wiring, assembling, testing, and packaging the display. At the time, Sean Hillmeyer, one of HeatSync Labs's founders, was unemployed and had just the sort of free time and skillset Bruning was looking for. Along with other tasks, Sean and other volunteers helped build “light modules” which made up each illuminated segment of a 16-segment letter.  Inside each module were several high power light bulbs—quartz worklight lamps.  All of the brackets that held the light modules together were engineered to be weather resistant and insulated from the heat generated by the lamps.  Each bracket, like most of the module, was made of stainless steel to avoid rusting.  In addition, each light module was enclosed in Pyrex® glass tubes which acted as ducts for fans to push cold, Canadian air in to cool the modules off.  "These things generate a ton of heat, they are freakin' bright!" Sean explained.

Photo by Sean Hillmeyer. All rights reserved.

Like the original piece, the new system was designed to be bright as hell and was powered a three-phase 480VAC power source, which Toronto city hall didn't really have an extension cord for;  A semi-truck-sized generator would need to be parked nearby to growl away in the parking lot.  The power was delivered to four distrobution boxes by huge 000 AWG (~10mm thick) cables.  Sean spent the majority of his time in Phoenix (and Toronto) wiring these boxes which provided a way to control the massive light displays.  In each box the power supply was broken out  into 36 circuit breakers, which delivered power to 36 solid state relays.  The relays were connected to a DMX lighting controller which enabled the segments of the letters to be remotely switched on and off from a single computer interface.  The entire 4 Letter word machine is essentially a giant DMX light fixture.  To connect the distribution boxes to the light modules, 6 19-pin Socaplex connectors per box and over 1.5 miles of cable ran to the letters suspended 65 meters above the ground.  Each 16-segment letter was composed of 36 220V light modules.  The light modules were further segmented into 4 parallel sets of 2 110V bulbs wired in series.  The whole system was designed to be CE rated for Canadian electrical safety compliance, a requirement for public performances.

The time volunteers spent on the project paved its way for a timely delivery.  Sean was subsequently invited to come along and assist the crew in the Great White North.  Much like their time volunteering in Phoenix, their visit to Toronto was no vacation, but rather an adventure.  The Toronto crew, which Sean was now an integral part of, stayed at a cheap hostel, rented bikes, and ate catered food along with the obligatory trip to Tim Hortons, which was tragically poutine-free.

All of the components for the 4 Letter Word Machine were shipped to Toronto City Hall in a semi-truck in specialy constructed shipping crates. Everything had to be reassembled, tested, and inspected. It rained every day, and the crew had little shelter to work in.  The streak of rain continued until right before the start of Nuite Blanche.  After the inspection was finished and errors corrected, the truss that was set up had to rise upward.  This was accomplished with two motors/wenches attached to the top of each letter and connected to a pulley block by steel cable that transferred most of the load to strands of Dynex Dux rope (which is designed for heavy sailing, oil rigging, and other situations where it would really, really suck if your line snapped).  The ropes went over the top of the Toronto City Hall towers to solid concrete counter weights on the other side that were the size of [American] cars, except better looking.

Photo by Sean Hillmeyer. All rights reserved.

Only a half-hour before showtime, the crew saw an epic wall of black cloud roll over the city, bringing with it weather RAGE in the form of high winds.  A microburst windstorm hit City Hall.  The massive metal letters were swaying 30' from the center line, and one part twisted nearly 45 degrees.  Cables started whipping around, some sheets of plywood on the ground were picked up by the wind and flown around like maple leaves.  The entire sound booth was taken out by the wind like a deck of cards.  “I think we even lost a laptop” Sean recalled.  City officials were completely freaking out, and the mayor was at a party in a hotel down the street watching Mother Nature go Mortal Combat all over the giant metal light fixtures, which dangled precariously over his office.  Defiant against nature, the meticulously engineered display held up and survived the wind burst.

Originally, actors were supposed to control the letter display on the ground by moving large metal bars with spring-loaded contacts across a panel with a series of bolts, which would close the circuit and make some awesome looking sparks to fly.  This wouldn't have been a problem in the dry, still desert air of Arizona... but this was Ontario.  The electrical inspector was going bananas over this.  The wind and moisture made that particular aspect of the piece more than a little unsafe and that thus didn't end up happening.  Instead, the crew had to route a cable to a tent with a makeshift control center.  From there, Sean drove the light display off his netbook temporarily while an emergency trip to the Apple store was made to swap out a hard drive on the weather damaged laptop that would drive the display.  After that crisis was resolved, the sound crew serenaded onlooking Canadians with a nice twelve hour chunk of “eerie bassy grungie electronic music” that went along with some of the lighting displays in Max MSP that would attempt to read what the display was showing and try to pronounce the "words" that were generated in a deep creepy bassy voice.  As a growing crowd gravitated towards city hall, the wind and rain remained in retreat and the night was saved.

Beautiful Light, Nuit Blanche 09 from NOW Magazine on Vimeo.