Resistance Is Beautiful

As a general rule, heat is a bad thing when it comes to electronics. Circuit boards and component layouts are specifically engineered to dissipate heat as efficiently as possible. But in the world of art, beauty can be found anywhere — even in the heat produced by electrons whizzing through tiny copper traces on a circuit board.

Artist Timon Bohn has created an art installation called The Garden of Forking Paths that blends elements from the natural world and electronics to produce beautiful imagery. The work consists of a matrix of printed circuit boards, each with a branching pattern of traces that was algorithmically designed with the help of a JavaScript library called p5.js. The winding paths of the traces are meant to bring to mind images of rivers or the structures found in biological organisms.

But that is not the only purpose of the twisted paths of the traces — they were also designed to vary the electrical resistance of each trace as current flows through it. And of course as resistance increases, so does the generation of heat. That is where the thermochromic ink that was painted onto each board comes in. As the temperature changes, so does the color of the ink, which causes interesting and thought-provoking patterns to appear on the surface of The Garden of Forking Paths.

If a current were simply applied to each circuit board, the imagery would quickly settle in on a static state, which would grow tiresome before too long. So Bohn instead sent variable pulses of electricity through each panel. With the help of an Arduino Uno and some PCA9685 pulse-width modulation driver chips, the patterns of electricity flowing through the traces (and therefore, patterns of heat generation) are always changing.

The next time you accidentally reverse the polarity of a circuit or mix up your voltage levels, remember that you didn’t just fry your project — you also created a beautiful work of art. If you manage to release some magic smoke, so much the better.