Ao Lei

Ao Lei is a creative technologist and digital artist with expertise in interactive installation, generative design, and computer graphics.

Ao finished his bachelor degree in Nuclear Engineering at TsingHua University in China, where he led a student experiment team in quantum optics.

Coming from a mixed background, Ao is passionate about bridging the boundary between art and physics. He aims to provide a new way of perceiving the world from a physics-based perspective.

Traditional arts are based on "atomic" mediums. Artworks themselves are classified and judged by the uniqueness and identifiability of art mediums. The medium's texture, space, and volume enable the audience's subconscious desire to touch the artwork.

Current "bit-based" digital art has realized the transformation from tangible "atoms" to intangible "bits", which enables me to reflect on the gap between them. I want to explore the possibility of finding & defining a new form of art medium sitting between "atom-based" and "bit-based".

The physical properties of radiation make itself precisely stand between atom-based and bit-based art mediums. Radiation emitted from a single atom must be parsed and presented in bits, of which the process is an artistic construction. Taking background radiation as a medium for artistic creation can inspire artists to rethink the meaning of materiality.

Although invisible, radiation shows excellent potential for being a new art medium. Controlling the magnetic field, absorption proportion, and other parameters, can provide enough freedom for artists, just like painting.

The physical properties of radiation make itself precisely sit between atom-based and bit-based mediums. Radiation emitted from a single atom must be parsed and presented in bits, of which the process is an artistic construction.

Radiation detector like G-M tube, proportional counter and scintillator detector have been existing for decades. They show great performance and reliability in specific scenarios. But most of the radiation detectors that we currently have are omnidirectional.

Some attempts have been made in lab environments but they are usually expensive and non-portable. For my project, I designed a directional radiation sensor based on BPX-61 Si photodiode, which can detect ionising radiation when blocking visible lights. It shows comparable sensitiveness and great ability for directional sensing.

The positioning system is placed on a flat surface within the range of 0.2m to 5m from the user. It is composed of a pan-tilt platform, LiDAR, and a NoIR camera. A computer vision algorithm running on the microcontroller will track the movement of the directional detector.

The detection system can be precisely positioned through the angular feedback unit on the pan-tilt system and the laser range data. The positioning system also records the normal vector of the detector.

The detection system sends data to the phone app via OSC protocol. The mobile phone app can also relay the radiation level, position, user input, and timestamp data to PC / Mac via OSC for further creation of data-driven artworks.

The mobile phone app allows users to preview their work in AR. Users can also control the build-in electromagnet, simulated electric field, and absorption rate (which controls which kind of radiation the user want to capture). The phone app also works as an indicator for radiation level, shown as CPM and energy peak.

The final embodiment is a phone accessory that can attach to the back of phones but is also capable of working as a standalone device.

By attaching to a phone, the whole system can work seamlessly with the app and utilize the built-in sensors of phones to increase tracking accuracy further.

We can get different radiation outputs by pointing the detection device to different sections of a banana, which is radioactive because it contains Potassium-40. The radiation state of this particular point is then saved and can be changed by magnetic field, simulated electrical field, and absorption proportion in real-time (a typical time window is between 30 to 60 seconds). Manipulating radiation is exciting when we have enough data points. That is where creativity comes in.

Radiation skeleton – A smoke detector was scanned. The jointed radiation data point shows radiation fluctuation. Skeletons are joined together according to distance, radiation level, and similarity. The denser skeletons show higher radiation levels.

Radioactive creatures – Bananas and salt were scanned. These weird creatures live on radioactive materials. The magnetic field is an obstacle; the electrical field is wind, and decay products are pheromones.

Ao Lei

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Royal College of Art