Getting a glimpse into the curious minds of others has never been so beautiful – or so bright.

Designers Brian W. Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fiber-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualizes library searches in flashes of colored light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over five miles of fiber-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorize, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of color.

Visualizations begin when a person uses specific words while searching online library catalogs. Subjects including social sciences, arts, languages, history, and philosophy have been categorized by the Dewey Decimal System into 904 text labels, so that when a person uses any one of those labels in their search, it’s filtered through the categories and the corresponding fiber optic cable lights up. If a person clicks on one of the results of their search, another cable will light up. There’s also a donor mode in which the entire display flashes with all the different colors of light, as a way to thank the private donors that made the project possible.

Filament Mind may live at the Teton County Library, but it lights up the searches from all the libraries in the state as a reminder of the continuous search for knowledge taking place at different libraries.

When faced with the challenge of making meaning out of thousands of library searches, using light may not be the most obvious solution. But thanks to the availability of LED technology and its ability to work with data processing systems, Brush says light is another way to bridge the gap between people, the information they seek, and the places they live in.

“The manipulation of light has always been used to express meaning in art and architecture. But now that we can put real, live data behind that light, a whole new potential for intra-environmental communication is possible,” Brush says. “Light can now also be content.”

Now that content can be accessed over many different mediums and in many different spaces, we’re opening up a new world of data art and architecture that uses everything around us to integrate people, places, and information. Brush and Lee hope Filament Mind, as one of these pieces of data art, will not only encourage people to interact with the library, but also encourage people to interact with each other, share ideas, and explore content new to them.

“Some of the best moments I've seen with the project have been when a flash of light in a fiber optic cable catches a person's eye and they see it is illuminating a category of knowledge they never even knew existed,” Brush says. “Where they take that moment from there is up to them, but now they're aware of something new they can discover.”