“Visitors Magnet” Is a Magnetic Playground in the Form of an Art Installation

I’m going to tell you a secret: I don’t usually “get” art pieces. Sure, I can appreciate a nice painting for its aesthetics; but the lofty purple prose that artists tend to use when describing their work doesn’t resonate with me. When it comes to interactive art installations, I find joy in devising how the underlying mechanisms work. That’s why Niklas Roy’s “Visitors Magnet” interactive art installation appeals to me — it has a whole bunch of different mechanisms to study.

Visitors Magnet is roughly the size and shape of an oven shoved up against a refrigerator. That massive enclosure gave Roy plenty of room to incorporate all kinds of goodies. They all incorporate magnetism, but each individual element does something unique. Roy describes his art piece as a “cabinet of curiosities” and I think that is an accurate description. In total, Visitors Magnet contains 10 different curiosities. I’ll describe some of the more interesting curiosities below, but you can find all of the details on the project page linked above.

The simplest experiment in the Visitors Magnet box is a good ol’ fashioned compass. People can move a magnet around the compass to observe how it follows the magnet. Another curiosity works in a similar way, but on a greater scale. This “magnetic domain demonstrator” contains 90+ tiny compasses that all move independently, which illustrate how magnetic fields cover an area. Moving to three dimensions, the Magnaprobe is a magnet mounted in gyroscope to show how the magnet rotates and tilts in the presence of a magnetic field.

As a retrocomputing enthusiast, my favorite curiosity is the vintage CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitor. It receives a video signal from a camera mounted above. But visitors can manipulate the video on the screen in two ways. They can move a magnet near the glass to alter the electron beam and create a kaleidoscope effect. They can also spin a motor, which generates electricity that flows through an additional coil that rotates the image on the screen.

The last experiment I want to tell you about uses two components that our readers should be familiar with: an Arduino development board and a strip of WS2812B “NeoPixel” individually addressable RGB LEDs. The Arduino monitors the voltage from a Hall effect sensor, which visitors can alter by moving a magnet nearby. The Arduino alters the LEDs color and animation pattern based on the input from the Hall effect sensor, providing instant feedback.