mass moca
Julie and I recently visited Mass Moca to see the Spencer Finch exhibit, What time is it on the sun?. Finch’s work strove to reproduce elements of sensory experience removed from their natural context. For example, in “Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds,” a bank of fans reproduced the variations of the gentle breeze at Walden Pond at a particular time period. In other works, the mood of the museum was altered by the indirect light from pieces that reproduced the light of the sky or the ground at specific locations and times. “Sunlight in an Empty Room” is shown on the right. It reproduces the color of the light in the home of Emily Dickinson as a cloud passes by. The macroscopic context was always obliterated within the piece. However, the exhibition guide recovered the context and its descriptions became an integral part of enjoying the work.
Julie’s first body of work has a similar notion. She visually separates the gestalt of natural objects from particular symmetries, graphic forms or textures.
We found Finch’s “Night Sky…” particularly inspiring. The bulbs hung from the ceiling are connected to describe the molecular structure of pigments that might be used in a painting of the Arizona sky on a particular evening. Finch’s meta-metaphor is fun, but I’m content just to put some interesting lights on our ceiling. The plan is to cover a meandering patch of our eat-in kitchen with light bulbs.
I decided that a relatively dense packing of G40 and G25 bulbs, would look nice. Finch used bulbs with curly filaments, but I’m not sure where to get them. The bulbs will hang by their wires from hardboard panels. Tubular white appliance wire would probably look better than the clear/copper wire that I used. I found the porcelain sockets that Finch used at Home Depot, and Julie used hot-glue to make a kind of strain-relief so that the weight of the bulb is supported by the casing of the wire, rather than the electrical connections (in retrospect, hot glue is probably a poor choice of material to use around a hot bulb).
Each panel is 16×20″ and should hang ten to twenty bulbs. The panels will let me build and install the project in a modular way and hopefully without permanent damage to the ceiling. It’s actually kind of hard to arrange the bulbs “by hand”. They are fragile, and the wires like to tangle and flop around. So I modeled the bulbs and wires in Mathematica and set to work making an energy function whose minimization would give a nice bulb arrangement. The first experiment used ten bulbs. That’s a lot of degrees of freedom, but with some difficulty I managed to coax the built-in numerical minimization engine to give a reasonable arrangement. I will probably need to write my own optimization algorithm to solve a larger number of bulbs. Based on the plan determined by the minimization function, I drilled the holes in the hardboard and used heat-shrink tubing on the wires to the bulbs to set their length. Julie tried replacing the globe-style bulbs with cylindrical ones. It could look interesting (a stubby version of Sina’s “The End of the Red Line” of the Alewife MBTA station), but it would end up being more expensive.
We’ll paint the panel white (better to do this before stringing the wires!), but it looks good. The clear casing on the wire is a bit too stiff; I want the bulbs to hang straight down.