Midterm Project: Living Trash Reef

For my midterm project I am working on incorporating arduino into my sculpture. My sculpture is based on the form of a coral reef, made out of different plastics, mainly bottles. My concept is to have the reef lit up by LEDs that are bright when a viewer looks at it from afar, but when the viewer approaches, using infrared sensors to monitor proximity, the lights would turn off and the piece would start to shake. I am fascinated with the idea of using 'trash' to create art and furthermore drawing out issues of conservation, global warming, recycling, and human excess and waste through this medium. The idea behind the movement is that nature is beautiful and perfect without human interference, and humans bring with them ultimately destruction for nature. I had a lot of troubleshooting to do on this project, and thus I am not near completion at this time. I bought an Arduino Uno and Adafruit PMW servo shield this break, which I was stoked to get started on, but I immediately encountered a problem uploading to it. The error message showed the serial port was already being used when indeed it was not. I looked into the problem and tried to uninstall and reinstall the program multiple times. I tried in the terminal a Kill 140 command that I learned about through the forums, but again to no avail.