I believe that the root of many social issues, especially those concerning contested space or xenophobia, is the departure from the idea that we all part of a shared humanity that exists as a system in a universal organism. When we began to separate ourselves from each other on the grounds of philosophical belief or geographic orientation we start to forget that there is more that we share than that separates us. My goal as an artist is to produce work that evokes a sense of oneness and interconnectivity in the viewer. I am currently conceiving a project that uses sensor inputs from a set of ‘pads’ on the ground to trigger lighting sequences across a pattern of light boxes set into the ground around the pads. The idea is to make the audience aware that by orienting themselves as part of a whole to provide inputs to the sensors (stand on the pads) they can control the outcomes of the lighting sequences that are playing around them (make super sweet colorful patterns swirl around). My idea is to create a version of this that could evoke the same idea, but instead of having sensors located next to each other, have them located across the world between the U.S. and Cuba. There would be a station in two locations, one in Cuba, and one somewhere in the United States (ideally where there could be a team working to troubleshoot the system if need be). Each station would have some kind of light object that would play through a sequence intended to illustrate the current sense of disconnectedness that we inhabit in our world. This object would be connected to a sensor that would sense the presence of a spectator at both stations. When both sensors were triggered at the same time (somebody at each station is standing in front of the object or doing some action to imply working together or ‘being one’) than a different sequence would be triggered, illustrating what is possible when we forget what divides us and focus on our shared humanity.
Executing this project would take a fair amount of funding for electronics and sculptural build, as well as research into the viability of a network system that could share inputs across such a large area. As I continue to develop this idea for use outside of this project, I can begin to create the light objects and sensors that would make it run. In my classes this semester I think I can begin to get a better idea of how to create a system to share data over the internet, in order to make this work over such a large distance.
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