My role
Designed, assembled, and programmed the responsive lighting system.
Collaboration
Robin Cass’s glass paired with my typography and electronics.
Status
Completed artwork brightens as the viewer approaches.
Robin Cass, my wife and a glass artist whose work I’ve long admired, and I were invited into a group show built around light. We used it to carry our 2017 exhibition If Anything Happens… forward: her glass, my type, and the theme of nineteenth-century messages sent by sea.
I designed the circuit boards in the shelf, had them fabricated, then assembled and programmed them, with LEDs, an ultrasonic sensor, and an Arduino, so the bottle brightens as you approach. Up close, moving around it seems to “insert” the wall text into the glass. Hold fast is an odd instruction when you’re waiting to be rescued at sea. We’re all waiting on help and hope, and the best we can do is make art about it.
