Category: lightObject

Skärgården re-imagines cold war paranoia in the Stockholm archipelago in light and sound.

These rocky islands serve both as the city’s summer playground and, since Viking times, as a defensive maze guarding the sea approach to Stockholm. In the 70s and 80s, worries about encroaching soviet submarines and electronic warfare sparked public controversy leading to the creation of secret military installations in the islands, and even live fire incidents with depth charges being deployed against the possibly imaginary invaders.

The heart of this art installation is a self-organizing wireless mesh network that alludes to Sweden’s early lead in wireless technology with node behavior that mirrors aspects of both the isolation and cooperation of an interconnected system of separate parts.

This work made possible by the Frank C. Springer Family Innovative Faculty Award.

This project grew out of my experience teaching beginning design students who had been through a traditional color class and seemed to have no intuitive sense of the digital representation of color.

The device has three sliders and a toggle switch: in RGB mode, each slider represents proportions of red, green and blue respectively, and in HSV mode they represent hue, saturation and value. In both modes, the sliders regulate those parameters of a set of colorful LED lights.

By setting the mode and then playing with the sliders, a feeling for the proportions of red, green and blue or hue position required to make a particular color soon develops—and without the sometimes intimidating interface of an Adobe product.

1′05″ explores and embraces the contradictions of the German V2 rocket: an object of great formal beauty, ugly purpose and uglier production methods. Developed toward the end of the Second World War, the weapon caused many more deaths in production than deployment, and would go on to form a significant part of the foundation for the U.S. space program.