What This Is
A large-scale interactive sculpture at the intersection of art and physics, engineering and design.
A plasma globe with filaments of color as wide as your arm that respond to touch and pulsate to the beat of ambient music.
The brightest, most hypnotizing spectacle anywhere in Black Rock City, or any other venue it will inevitably visit as it tours the country.
What We Need
- A 24" heat-treated acrylic test sphere, scaled to fit the final specs with all the necessary penetrations for gas intake, outlet, and electrode. Manufactured by a world leader in pressure vessel fabrication for submersibles and related applications, it will allow us to determine the final plasma characteristics for the full-size model.
- A purpose-built high voltage, high frequency power supply, with audio input as a modulation source for voltage and frequency.
- Rare gas supply of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon.
- A quality vacuum system
Challenges
There are some unknown unknowns associated with a project like this, which is why Phase I testing and feasibility studies are so necessary.
For one, it seems that most plasma artists who create globes of their own have convinced themselves that glass is the only appropriate medium for the sphere, since plastics - particularly acrylic - normally outgas too severely to maintain the constant pressure and gas composition necessary to maintain plasma for any significant time period. Unfortunately, glass is absolutely prohibitive when it comes to building any sphere larger than four feet in diameter, particularly if it must withstand the pressure of a moderate vacuum.
However, our fab-lab has years of experience building acrylic pressure vessels with this in mind, and are confident they can eliminate outgassing, or at least reduce it such that the sphere may only require a purge and re-fill once every several days. This will be accomplished through established fabrication techniques which have already been applied to specialized medical devices that require the same consistent pressure and purity of atmosphere.
Secondly, the number of variables which produce visually desirable plasma are great, and with a volume this size it is unclear which combinations of pressure, gas composition, voltage and frequency are required. Most importantly, we must experimentally determine which of the possible plasma-generating equations yield a beautiful result that is also safe to touch.
Safety is obviously our highest priority. Which is why our design specs call for the sphere to meet the highest international safety rating which governs pressure vessels for human occupancy, and guidance from engineers with project-specific expertise to ensure that transmitted power will always remain low enough to allow up-close interaction with the sphere without inducing harmful electric currents in nearby devices or spectators.
Phase I funding allow us to not only overcome these challenges experimentally, but to arrive at one or more exact "recipes" for safely generating plasma with striking visual characteristics.
Perks
Perks have not yet been decided, but at the very least, donors over $100 will be included in our application to the Guinness Book of World Records!
Future perks will include custom mini USB plasma balls, branded merch, and more.
