MIRUS

Someone handed me a parts list and told me to build a ceiling rig. Another crew had already hung eighty wooden baffles twelve feet above the floor. I had them also press in the RGBW wash strips in routed channels on the bottom. The channels had sharp ninety-degree corners. Bending flexible copper tape around those turns snapped the backing. I ended up doing quite a lot of repairs.

To keep the install clean, I ran the wiring out the ends of the wood and straight up into a six-foot plenum. I walked across the rafters up there to build the control system. I grouped the baffles into ten zones, pairing one power supply to one DMX decoder with 8 outputs. The power units they bought ran with loud fans. Usually, that ruins an art gallery. Luckily, the room shared a door with a nightclub. The ambient bass swallowed the fan hum.

I wired the decoders to control each baffle individually while keeping the ceiling on a single DMX universe. During the day, the room needed flat white illumination. At night, we flipped a preset and the ceiling ran heavy color chases. Blasting saturated light against white walls completely washed out the art. Because most of the paintings were psychedelic anyway, I threw out standard gallery rules. We let the colors bleed and turned the room into an extension of the dance floor.