Information Digestion

This is a piece of artwork I did for school. I wished I'd documented it better so I could have created an instructable but I just don't have enough photos. That aside, I thought it would be fun to share some of my work anyway. 

The piece was in response to frustrations I was feeling about school and the system that a large university relies on to sustain it's self. There seemed to be a pattern of professors trying to convey information and it would regularly be misunderstood or misrepresented. 

Up until this point I really never liked making  "conceptual art", it was always purely visual. Even to this day I continue to make visual based art. Though I did enjoy making this sculpture immensely I just really don't have that strong of opinions that I have to share them with the world regularly.  

The concept:

It was three powder coated steel frames attached to white precast cement hemispheres. The sculpture had three peers and one professor. The white pieces represented the students and the yellow the professor. It's a pretty basic system. The "stamen" of the yellow piece had an LED on the end of it that fed light to photo sensors in the hemispheres of the white pieces. The LED was controlled by a simple timer circuit that would come on and off in seemingly random patterns. As the light intensified the photo sensors triggered their own timer circuits that created certain oscillations connected to a piezo. Each "peer" had it's own sound that would intensify with the light, so I ended up with three different sounds all running in concert filling the gallery with some really fun mixes of both annoying and pleasant sounds. I changed the sounds by adding a potentiometer to the circuit board so I could manipulate the pieces individually. On a side note, the gallery attendants were not that thrilled with the piece. I came in to change the batteries one morning and there was tape over the photo sensors. As you can imagine I was not to thrilled.

Like I said before I wish I had documented better so I could give you a sample of the sound they made, it was really fun. Not by any means profound, but you get the idea. "Professor shining their light on their students and nothing but awkward noise coming out, and the students continued to stay white because they were not retaining any information". Hope you like it and hope I didn't offend any art students. Like my father always said "it takes four years to get your BFA and seven to get over it", it's a quote from an artist professor he taught with.

Thanks for looking.