Street Light

We propose to build a street light. Every so often during the day and night the street light will rear up, open a mouth of sorts in the lamp bit and make exclamations into its city alleyway home. Sometimes it will whisper. The street light would be a 4 axis automaton with a motor to sway the neck, one to rear it, one to cock the lamp, and one that opens the lamp into two parts, breaking the beam in half, the resulting dark spot filled by the voices of youth. When inventing vocalizations for the light, youth would also design the accompanying gesture in software that models the form and capabilities of the street light, be it a secretive turning towards the wall before a whisper or a muddled shaking of the head before spitting out a few short poems.

The particular exclamations and whisperings would be invented and recorded by youth at after-school programs all around Pittsburgh, starting with our partner, the Carnegie Science Center's Mission Discovery program. Teen assistants will be hired to work directly on the sculpture, sowing the seeds for more robotics artists to emerge in Pittsburgh. Youth involvement in this project can continue year to year at very low cost, new voices and gestures given to the street light by fresh groups of young people, ensuring that the voices heard are those of present youth and not the youth of a decade earlier. In essence, we will provide the body of this street light and Pittsburgh youth the gestures and voice.

As individual artists (Gregory Witt and Ian Ingram), we have created large public kinetic sculptures in Pittsburgh (please see the image tab below for samples of these and other prior work). We see Pittsburgh as a hub of robotic art and are eager to see the city laced with robotic artworks, indoors and out. Gregory has worked with young people while a resident artist at the Children's Museum and Ian has worked with Pittsburgh teens as a pre-college art instructor, while working with the Children's Museum's Youth Alive program, and while the arts organizer for Robot 250.
For images and information about our prior work please visit http://www.gregorywitt.com/ and http://www.ingramclockworks.com.