I would like to have the inside of a 3d sculpture (one foot in height ) lite from the inside. I'd like to be able to program the lights to turn on one after the other following the twists and turns of the sculpture.
You can do it with a microcontroller. Probably the simplest to program and use right now would be to use a Picaxe microcontroller with Yenka programming software. Or, if you just need sequential lighting and not much in the way of programming aside from speed, then do a search for LED sequencer or LED sequential driver and you'll find all kinds of circuits for doing that. You can find kits too for this as well. Also, if you don't want to assemble anything you can find premade LED sequencers sold as motorcycle turn light signals. There is this too! So cool! You'd have to hack it and scale it down quite a bit though.