LED Throwies

LED Art is a form of light art constructed from light-emitting diodes. Many artists that use LEDs are guerrilla artists, incorporating LEDs to produce temporary pieces in public places. LEDs are very inexpensive to purchase and have become a new way to make street art. LEDs are, among others, used in installation art, sculptural pieces and interactive artworks.

Strobe art is another example, it consists of drawing red, green and blue colours onto a canvas or a piece of paper and then switching on an led strobe so that the object will appear to spin round or the scene will appear to change depending on the colours used. The positioning of the green colours will dictate which direction the object goes round.

In early 2007, there was a bomb scare in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States caused by a guerrilla marketing campaign. An advertising firm working for Turner Broadcasting System Inc. to promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force, one of the network's animated television shows, hired two artists to produce art for the ad campaign. The artists placed LED signs featuring a character known as a Mooninite in various locations across 10 cities. However, Boston was the only city that reacted by shutting down bridges and bringing in bomb squads to remove the LEDs. The majority of the light boards were removed and the artists were arrested.

An LED throwie is a small LED attached to a coin battery and a rare earth magnet (usually with conductive epoxy or electrical tape), used for the purpose of creating non-destructive graffiti and light displays. Artists use them by throwing individual LEDs onto metallic objects, like public sculpture or road infrastructure. By throwing LEDs onto an object, the object itself acts as a canvas. LED throwies were invented in 2006 by the artists Evan Roth and James Powderly the founder of Graffiti Research Lab at Eyebeam Atelier open lab NYC. After Graffiti Research Lab posted the instructions how to make a throwie on Instructables, LED throwies went viral on the Internet and could be found in advertising, were for sale as DIY kits or further developed by other artists and hackers worldwide.

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