Interactive Clouds

Christmas comes to Madrid and the City Council asks us to decorate the gallery of its main building with a series of ten clouds lit from the inside. Each cloud has its own electronics and its own animation logic, though the ten of them work in sync.

We programmed three states that rotate through the day. A storm mode with flashes and heavy saturation. A sunset mode that starts at the exact moment the real sun crosses the Madrid horizon — the system computes the sun angle and triggers the transition instead of relying on a fixed clock time, so the piece adjusts itself across the whole winter. And a strobe mode with a cold palette that only fires when the venue's snow machine kicks in: the machine's start signal reaches the controller and the ten clouds respond in the same beat.

Runs on TouchDesigner with a DMX output, plus an input layer for the snow-machine sensor and the astronomical clock. Very little visible electronics: the idea was that the clouds should look like clouds, not gear.