Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s Box was designed as part of the Dome system. Like the Viaggio it started life as box of chocolates and became a box of oscillators. I loved the coppery color and the deeper red lustrous interior …and I needed a small box for an array of misbehaving oscillators for the Dome. There are 5 oscillators controlled by a tangled web of control circuits. Some of the tangles involve visible light as their media. Notice in the picture of the interior that there are LEDs in the lower left corner of the lid, and in the lower right corner of the box-deck there are four photocells (just to the left of the round red switch on the right) . There are also LEDs below the clear acrylic deck. When the lid is closed the photo cells ‘see’ the blinking lights in the lid, and the reflections of the lights below the deck. When the lid is opened the photocells also see whatever ambient light is let in. Each photocell sees a different intensity and I amplify the differences among the cells to make a complex moving array of 16 (4 photocells x 4 differences) dynamic control voltages. It can get pretty messy in there. 2 of the output waves are varying pulse waves and 2 are staircase waves. The Dome is mostly subtractive processing. One of the Pandora’s Box outputs is a triangle wave routed to the Dome’s wave folder.