Naga Lighting Black Rock City What we built, and how it all fit together

Naga is a serpent about a hundred and thirty two feet from nose to tail tip, built in sections: a head and neck, a set of head fins, three humps and a tail. In 2024 she went to Black Rock City with the Captainess, the galleon moored at the other end of camp. The two pieces are one work, and you can read about the whole of it at nagaandthecaptainess.com.

This note is about the lighting, and specifically about the fixtures. Her skin is stainless steel mesh. Not chicken wire: heavy, stiff, structural, the kind of thing you lean on. Almost none of the light is aimed at the viewer. It is aimed at that mesh, from the inside, and what you see from fifty feet away is the skin itself glowing.

Three kinds of light

The whole design comes down to three families of fixture, each solving a different problem.

Point pixels, on the spikes. Fifty six twelve volt addressable pixels, in ten fixtures, sparse and sharp along the spine. Against nearly nine hundred watts of fin pucks they cost almost nothing to run, and they are what gives the silhouette its edge at night.

Pucks, on the fins. Two hundred and sixty, five volts, three watts each. The largest count of anything on the animal and by some way the largest power draw. The fins are flat and close to the eye, so they carry the detail and most of the color, and they are the only fixtures a visitor really sees as individual points of light.

Spotlights, inside the body. A hundred and twenty six of them, twelve volts, three watts each, mounted internally and pointed outward through the scales. These do the mass: the long body glow that reads from across the playa. Twenty four in the head and neck, thirty six in the first hump, twenty eight in the second, twenty in the third, eighteen in the tail. Section length sets the count.

Later, with more panels on it, and one of the large humps to fill.

Accent, detail, mass. Three problems, three different parts, and almost every other decision in the build follows from having split it that way.

The parts that did not exist yet

Most of this could not be bought. The spikes are the clearest case: fifty of them, each sunk about eight inches into the body from the point where the outer scales wrap it, spaced sixty inches apart along the spine. Their lights were built as leads in four lengths, three, four, six and eight feet, because a spike near the head and a spike near the tail sit at very different distances from anywhere you could put a power supply.

The fin harnesses were built the same way, to the shape of the actual fin rather than to a catalog. Thirty one octos, two quads, thirty two duos, plus spares on each, so that a fin which tapers gets a harness that tapers with it instead of a strip that runs out in the wrong place. Aluminum frames in four sizes carry the spotlights, with floods for the areas that needed washing rather than pointing.

The spares were not optimism. Of the fixtures assembled ahead of time, eighteen came through with bad caps and eleven with dead LEDs, and that was before anything went in a truck to the desert.

Feeding the serpent

Naga draws about fourteen hundred watts. Four hundred and forty seven of that is spotlights, eight hundred and ninety seven is fin pucks, eleven is spike pixels, and fifty is a deliberately generous guess for everything else. The Captainess adds two hundred and thirty one and the landscape lighting a hundred and fifty three, so the three together were planned at roughly seventeen hundred and ninety watts, with fifteen percent of headroom on top of every number.

That was fed by Mean Well LPV supplies, hundred watt units at twelve volts for the spotlights and the spikes, and at five volts for the fins, fourteen and thirteen of them respectively in the crates that went out. At this length you cannot feed a run from one end and hope, so the topology is full of injection points, tees, pass and no-pass variants, end caps and data boosters. Forty seven spotlight connections and twenty eight injection points, six of those spare.

Getting signal to it

Five Angio 4 controllers, one per section, sitting local to the lights they drive. A Raspberry Pi inside one of the humps running the show in Chromatik and speaking Art-Net to all five. Both the power and the Ethernet were trenched under the playa, which is the least glamorous part of the build and the reason the whole thing came up every night.

The fins that stayed off

One decision got made on the playa rather than in the workshop. The wind that week had been high, and we were not confident the fins would stay attached through it. A fin that lets go is sharp sheet metal flying across open desert at head height, past ten thousand people. So the fins stayed off for the event.

That is two hundred and sixty puck lights, the largest fixture count on the animal and close to two thirds of its power budget, spending the week in a crate. What ran at Black Rock City was the body and the spikes.

Did we build a Faraday cage?

Out of curiosity, we did test whether we could just send the data over Wi-Fi. The animal is wrapped head to tail in stainless steel mesh, which sounds a great deal like a Faraday cage, and if it behaved like one then the question answered itself.

It worked. Mesh at that gauge is apparently not connected enough to stop a signal getting out, which was a genuinely nice thing to learn with a radio in one hand.

We ran wire anyway, and the reason is not a sophisticated one. We wanted to be certain.

Out there the radio spectrum belongs to nobody. Art cars roam all night with their own gear aboard, every one of them carrying signals of its own, and camps in every direction are running whatever they brought. Any of it can sit on top of any of it. The playa is a wild place, and things get strange out there in ways you cannot plan for and would not want to be debugging in the middle of the night with a laptop in the dust.

So we buried cables. That is right: a full Ethernet network, trenched into the open desert. It is the boring answer and it is the certain one, and out there certain is worth a great deal more than clever.