Year
2015
Tag
Installations
In the garden, points of light gather around the people moving between them. Each contribution adds to a form that is still being made. A question about time spent in nature becomes something encountered outdoors, in the company of others.
Lights of Wild was developed for NightLife Live at the California Academy of Sciences. The installation asked participants about their relationship with the natural environment, placing their reported connection beside the connection they wished to have.
2015 · NightLife Live · California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco · Art & Research / Installations.
The California Academy of Sciences garden presentation.
A question of proximity
The questions considered where people live, the time they spend surrounded by nature and how they feel about that relationship. These are related questions, but they do not necessarily lead to the same answer.
A person may live close to a natural setting and spend little time in it. A desire for greater contact may also exist where access is difficult. The installation made room for the gap between a circumstance and a wish, without turning either into a judgement about the person answering.
Lights of Wild in the California Academy of Sciences garden, NightLife Live.
Lights of Wild in the California Academy of Sciences garden, NightLife Live.
An accumulation of encounters
Participation altered the physical work. Each person’s answers became a contribution to a growing visual form. Its illuminated elements allowed the accumulation to remain visible after dark.
The museum garden gave the questions an immediate setting. Participants were considering their connection with nature while already standing within a designed outdoor environment. The work placed that relationship beside the more habitual situations from which people had arrived.
Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland. Photograph: Sander Heezen.
Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland. Photograph: Sander Heezen.
The work in another landscape
The work was also presented at Into the Great Wide Open in Vlieland. There, the lights occupied a wooded setting, and visitors approached the installation along and between the trees. Sander Heezen’s photographs document this second landscape.
The question persisted across the two settings, while the surroundings changed the encounter. Lights of Wild gave a collective shape to different accounts of closeness and distance. The growing arrangement offered a way to notice those differences, and to consider the conditions that make a desired connection possible.
Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland. Photograph: Sander Heezen.
Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland. Photograph: Sander Heezen.
Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland. Photograph: Sander Heezen.
How it was made
Participants answered three questions and contributed to an accumulating illuminated structure. Slender supporting elements, light points and connections allowed the answers to take shape in the outdoor setting.
Explanatory reconstruction based on the project archive. The drawing shows the installation and visitor interaction; it is not a fabrication plan.
References
- Original DDS case study — Original project description and photographic record.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives. Into the Great Wide Open photographs: Sander Heezen.
