LED throwie – it sounds like a children's cartoon, doesn't it?
Okay, maybe not, but they're fun to make. You tape an LED to a battery, maybe add some magnets to the battery so that it sticks to something metal. Done. Like these:
Besides them costing about a buck a pop to make, this is a very guerilla way to graffiti something made of metal. Now hopefully you'd clean them up when they were dead, but I'm an optimist. What's most excellent is when a bunch of people come together for the specific purpose of making some light art with these throwies – check out this video:
The Graffiti Research Lab, which does a bit of light art and lighting-related graffiti, made these LED throwies popular. Check out their website, and check out Eyebeam Openlab, the folks who organized the event in the video.
A post on EL wire and throwies! Pretty much a couple of years ago this is how I started getting into proffesional lighting, I was messing around with leds/el wire and people said "why dont you just look into pro lighting…" and here I am now
But as far as these lil throwies, I took this idea back in 04/05 I think, and I bought 2000 leds, I hanged from the ceiling about 1000 leds on fishing wire and fogged up the warehouse and the effect looked incredible! Albeit it was very time consuming, and very hard working with fishing wire and getting all tangled up. But with the other 1000 I put in a plastic box and during the event handed them out to people, then someone came running upto the box, grabs it, and throws all 1000 leds out into the crowd, as mad as I was, it looked incredible seeing them fly through the air
for all the environmentally friendly out there, yes those 2000 batteries are incredible harmful if disposed incorrectly, but I took it to a proper computer/battery recycling center after the event