Street Light
Location
About You
Location
Project Street Address
424 Gold Way
Project City
Pittsburgh
Project Province/State
PA
Project Postal/Zip Code
15213
Project Country
United States
Innovation
What is your idea? What makes your project innovative? Why is it important?
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.
Impact
What will be the impact of your idea?
We see this street light automaton as a contemporary equivalent of wonders like the old clocks in places like Bern that at a given hour play out stories with mechanical figures. People gather and wait for the clocks to come to life and watch in delight as they make their performances.
In a world filled with wonders, though, an oft overlooked object like a street light coming to life and becoming the mouth and body of the people who will be Pittsburgh’s future will be all the more wondrous. We imagine that people will come to be witness to its mutterings and that, for the young people whose voices and choreographies are broadcast by the light, this will be a tremendously exciting thing to see and be a part of.
Moreover, 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.
What will it take to launch your idea? How will you secure community support and youth participation?
We have spoken to several organizations that run youth after school programs about assisting us in creating the programming to lead youth invention and recording of gestures, exclamations, and whisperings. The Carnegie Science Center's after-school programs have already agreed to partner with us and others are optimistic they can do the same. We will also need the necessary permissions to place a street light in the eventual location but assume that choosing a final site for the work will be a collaborative process between us, the grant-givers, and the city. Our plan is to use the full $25,000 grant, roughly divided into $10,000 for materials and fabrication costs, $5000 to pay youth assistants at various stages of the project, and $5000 each to pay for our time designing, building, and installing the piece. For images and information about our prior work please see attached images and visit http://www.gregorywitt.com/ and http://www.ingramclockworks.com.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
We are looking for ideas from people who can make them happen. Tell us about yourself or your team.
We are two artists who make mechatronic and robotic sculptures. We both have realized large public kinetic sculptures in Pittsburgh, one of which, the “Green Roof Roller Coaster” by Gregory and Joey Hays, now sits upon the roof of the Children’s Museum’s entrance, beginning its second year of operation. We have the capabilities to build the mechanical, electrical, electronic, structural, software, sculptural, and gestural systems for “Street Light.”
We plan to work with partners to develop the youth programming for this project but Ian has already worked with Pittsburgh youth as a pre-college art instructor and while working with the Children’s Museum’s Youth Alive program and tangentially with other youth programs when he was the arts organizer for the arts and technology education and empowerment project, Robot 250.
We see Pittsburgh as a hub of robotic art, perhaps eventually the primary one, and are eager to see the city laced with robotic artworks, indoors and out.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| GreenRoofRollerCoaster.jpg | 491.11 KB |
| GreenRoofRollerCoaster_cardetail.jpg | 199.19 KB |
| YoureNumberOne.JPG | 837.88 KB |
| YoureNumberOne_Pointing.jpg | 242.28 KB |
| RedAirplanes.jpeg | 138.37 KB |
| DuckDuckGoose.jpg | 622.12 KB |
| Puddle_detail.jpg | 117.17 KB |
| SurlyBondsOfEarthworms_suitdetail.jpg | 273.05 KB |
| StreetLight_1.jpg | 608.22 KB |
| StreetLight_2.jpg | 363.44 KB |
| StreetLight_3.jpg | 231.15 KB |
 | leo_hphp@yahoo.ca said: The world from beyond, is above us, in - LEO - Low Earth Orbit! YOUR GREAT IDEA could make a sculpture of LEO to help it ... about this Competition Entry. - 924 days ago read more > |
| railroader said: What it should say on the 1st Sunday of August? If it is what I guess it should than I like this idea! Wouldn't it have huge social impact?! about this Competition Entry. - 924 days ago read more > |
| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 930 days ago |
| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 932 days ago |
| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 932 days ago |
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| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 933 days ago |
| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 933 days ago |
| jlawrence updated this Competition Entry. - 934 days ago |
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Comments
Hi Ian,
Could you talk more about the social impact of your idea? I appreciate the community building aspect of this but I'm wondering if there could be even more nuances to explore. For example, how specifically would youth be involved beyond sharing their voices. Perhaps there would be a vocational element too?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best,
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
The youth are not only sharing their voices but also coding gestures for the machine in the after school programming that accompanies the project. This programming is indeed an educational aspect of the project where the youth will learn about the systems and sub-systems of robots and how they are integrated and, through their efforts to get the machine model to execute an interpretable gesture, about the process of taking something they have in their mind and making it happen in a real-world system. We have also budgeted to hire 3-5 youth assistants for 10 hours a week for about 4 months. These young people will have very direct hands-on experience with the process of building the sculpture and everything that goes into it. How we choose these individuals is something we plan to determine with our partners, the Children's Museum's Youth Alive program and the Carnegie Science Center's Mission Discovery program.
Ian
What it should say on the 1st Sunday of August? If it is what I guess it should than I like this idea! Wouldn't it have huge social impact?!
The world from beyond, is above us, in - LEO - Low Earth Orbit! YOUR GREAT IDEA could make a sculpture of LEO to help it hover! Broadcasting on city streets, has been done BUT not with young NEW voices like you guys are doing it. Montreal actually broadcasts over speakers hung on street poles/lamps. Hearing the voices is fun & interesting, yet there could be more to learn from these voices. Hope your chidlren are 'living seeds of innovation' & inpsire the city to 'take an active roole in the minds of those voices'. Our planet is suffering from human neglect; i imagine voices in one (kind of) accord, speaking, whether comically, shallow &/or in depth, about the things we could all be doing as "a global race of 'earthlings'" humanly-empowed to educate the (local) world about the health of 'our' planet & the activities that we do to compliment, Mother Earth, for her good works!
Pace your Peace within Patience~!
a.