What's going on - The technical details
The network of light has not only physical and electrical connections, but logical ones
as well. The sculpture is actually subdivided into subsections, with invisible borders
between them. A subsection is an independently powered section of Net Work. The
subsections wrap around and through each other, each one consisting of several
electrically connected light tubes, and are always in either an On or Off state. A
microcontroller maintains a record of the logical connections between the subsections
and controls relays that feed power to each subsection, or cut off that power. When an
operator throws a switch, that switch, via the microcontroller, changes the state of its
associated subsection from On to Off or vice versa. But when one subsection changes
state, its logical neighbors change state as well, to the opposite of whatever they had just
been. (See figure below for a graphical description). Thus, throwing switch 4, say, may have
a totally different result at one moment than it does later on, and the activation pattern
remains complicated for visitors to decode through experience, though it is simple
underneath. Whenever the network of Net Work is solved, the microcontroller, after
running the light show that rewards the hard work of many visitors, works backward
from a fully activated state to reach a partially active state that can be transformed back to
fully active by a correct sequence of switches.
In this example, throwing the switch for subsection 5 would turn off all the lights in that subsection, as well as in subsection 6, while turning on 1, 4, and 8.
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