A Nervous System (Brain)

Interactive printed circuit board sculpture

for ITP course Digital Fabrication with Danny Rozin

March 2024

A Nervous System is part of my Body of Work series and is a self portrait that depicts my social anxiety in sculptural form. It is a brain-shaped light sculpture that gets progressively more nervous the longer someone stands in front of it. The sculpture consists of custom designed and hand assembled printed circuit boards. They host a series of 160 addressable LEDs that swirl around in a spiraling pattern and resemble neurons firing. The system runs off of an Arduino Nano 33 IoT and a PIR motion sensor. If the nervous system detects a person standing in front of it for an extended period of time the LEDs gradually speed up and eventually “brown-out” and illuminate randomly. Through my research, I learned that neuron connections in the brain break down in heightened states of anxiety or depression.

For more info on how I made this, be sure to check out this blog post and this other one for a full run down and my Github repo with EAGLE files and code.

Thanks so much for the ITP Doc Lab for taking such great photos of my project!