The Savant Guard

Permanent interactive installation, commissioned for the City of Pasadena’s Public Art Program (to open in Sep. 2005), 15ft. X 50ft. X 4ft., Glass and metal sculptures with custom electronics; heliostat, booth structure. Interactive sculpture with sunlight used to "sense" passers-by. The booth sculpture responds to interruptions in the sunbeam by playing light sequences from within. Received the David Bermant Foundation Grant for public art 2004.

The Savant Guard is a public art commission from the city of Pasadena, California. It opens in September 2005, at which point it will be one of the first permanent "interactive" artworks at a public site in California.

This project began as an interactive parking booth- a memory of the booth on the empty lot of this development. The idea was to light the booth from inside with LED-based luminaires. They would play sequences reacting to the movements of passersby, making the booth apparatus a kind of placeholder for its obsolete security function (now taken over by surveillance cameras).

In our experiments with lighting the booth, we found we were always fighting against sunlight, the awesome lumens per square foot of the California sun. This seemed like an opportunity to work with the Sun, also as an acknowledgement of a larger "site". The sun figures prominently in California's mythical landscape. Its virtues have been tom-tommed by generations of California "boosters". Its inversion, as shadow, also occupies a crucial historical space, in the literary and cinematic constructions of Noir.

We took a decision to use the sun itself to light the booth. We have modified a sophisticated sun-tracker developed by Egis GmbH (for solar lighting applications) for our purposes. Using pre-programmed co-ordinates, and a large mircoprocessor-controlled mirror, it tracks the sun constantly through the day, and throughout the year, casting a constant circular beam onto the booth. As people walk in the 50-foot space between the tracker and the booth, they cast a shadow within this sunspot. Sensors within the booth measure the intensity of the light being received, and react to any shadows by triggering LED lighting sequences. This creates a contemporary ocular apparatus that "sees" through the solar medium. The external shadow and internal lighting overlap, similar to a test sequence (at 3pm) below:

In this way, the sun-tracker and the booth coexist, strung together by a thread of sunlight. This linkage is often disturbed by passersby (who are sometimes unaware of its existence), leading the booth to protest with flashing lights. This arrangement bears a direct resemblance to an electronic “trip wire” or movement sensor. At the same time, it is a deliberate conflation of old and new media, of the things that we have only begun to notice, and those that we have forgotten, in our urban environment. - Ulke, Sukumaran

model view:

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