Flamin' Rainbows

My name's Alex and I run Site 3 in Toronto, which helps people make amazing things. I also like to make amazing things, some of which you can see on my website. My friends mostly like to make extremely big, noisy things with fire, and I'm interested in fire art as well, but a different aspect of it: I'm interested in interactions.

Flame art interactions are quite straightforward at the moment, black and white, on or off at varying brightness and fury. I think this could be improved, and therefore have designed a system to dynamically colour LP-Gas flame effects on the fly.

What I would like to do is build the system for demonstration, very possibly into a steel display sculpture of an incredibly tacky rhinoceros. The goal is to have the system shoot six-colour rainbows in bursts of flame. Full rainbows, because flaming rainbows are funny and a good indicator everything is working properly. All six really-visible colours, ROYGBV, the ones you can get out of metal salts and water. I want to make this into a system that can be taken apart and mounted to any other different future sculpture, so we end up with a relatively safe system for responsively coloured flame effects that will not hose people with methanol, the most common safety risk of coloured fire after burning. This system could then be used by other people in ever more interesting interactions.

Essentially, I would like to make coloured flame where the blinky LED on the demo usually goes, then install it into different things that look better with fire than floodlights.

I have full schematics, designed with the help of an engineer. I also have my Record of Training for handling large amounts of propane, MIG art-welding experience, and a working demo of the Venturi effect colouring a torch green. I know this will work! I built a large part of the Heart Machine, and run an awesome workspace, and I love working with my hands. I might manage this either way, but funding would make it happen much, much faster. And I think it's funny! It is a flaming rainbow, for mounting to a unicorn. How is that anything but totally awesome? I present to you that it is, in fact, rad. Thanks for your attention.

Funded by Toronto (December 2011)