Product Design	My Artwork	Living Sustainably
Art Engineering	Tool Holder	Solar Power	Chevy Volt
		Solar Heating	Thermal Windows
Contact	About Me	Solar Hot Water	Solar Mower

Adobe corporate headquarters,
Almaden Lobby,
San Jose, California
"Digital Paper"
Concept Design:  Mauk Design
Design Engineering:  Ellipsis

In November 2004 I was contracted by Golden Gate Sign Company Inc. to program the control system for this artwork on the wall of the Adobe corporate Lobby.  The piece consists of 30 sheets of privacy glass in stainless steel frames.  Each pane of glass can turn from frosted to clear  with an electrical signal.  I was given several sequences to program that would symbolically represent the portable document format's (pdf) capabilities to transmit pages over the web.  Panes turning from clear to frosted indicated "active" pages as they animate across the wall.

The control box that I built incorporated a numbered graphic of the layout with lights that show when each pane is frosted.

I was able to show the client my programming sequences by emailing a movie of the front panel so they could approve the sequences before I shipped the controls across the country.

The control box measures about 18" X 24" and contains the programmable switching circuits and power transformers for the glass.  The computer chip that contains hundreds of lines of code that I wrote to choreograph the animations is inside at the top left.  The large relay board (made by NCD) in the center receives commands from this chip and actuates the relays that switch the glass panels.


Here are some closer views of the glass panels which were installed by Golden Gate Sign.




back to top