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R. Stern | New Media Artist

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Declarative Lamps

Materials/Languages: Solar garden lamps, electronic components including PIC chip, sound module, and LEDs

As a collaboration with artist Rees Shad, the Declarative Lamp Project was on display as part of the Kingston, NY Sculpture Biennial through October, 2007. (Lamps were on display in the uptown Kingston Peace Park)

Declaring

Overview video:

The Declarative Lamp Project uses electronic performance to explore the extent to which fear has been instilled in American culture. Witnesses in a park experience seemingly innocuous electronic pathway lighting that comes alive at dusk with lights and voices in many languages declaring, "I am not a bomb."

Because these devices exist in a natural environment and use human voices, we wished to add natural and personal elements to the Lamps' execution. There is a mathematical equation to calculate air temperature from the frequency of cricket chirps; if one monitors a single chirping cricket for 15 seconds, the number of chirps plus 39 is the air temperature (in Fahrenheit). In our piece, this equation has been reversed to allow the evening's temperature to establish the rhythm of the declarative voices. In cold temperatures, the lamps speak less often than in warm.

To give an innocuous overtone, we chose a number of Arts & Crafts style solar powered garden lights as the framework within which to build our project. Ordinarily these lamps store energy during daylight hours and engage an energy efficient LED light at dusk. Ms. Stern and I have repurposed these lamps to flicker as if they hold lightening bugs in correlation with the recorded messages. This process begins at dusk, producing a chorus of voices whose rhythm is directly related to the temperature of the evening air. The lamps each repeat the phrase "I am not a bomb" in one of twelve languages. After a twenty-minute performance, the lamps power down to await the next sunset.

Flickr pictures available.

Rees Shad's site about the project

This is an open source project. Visit the main project website for a materials/tools list, source code, and circuit diagram.