sunadd

Aileen Stanziola, Luming Hao

sunadd is an exploration of energy, voltage, difference, abstraction, materiality, information, digitality, and computation in the form of a 1 bit adder of solar information.

http://luminghao.com/2019-04-11-sunadd/

Description

sunadd is an exploration of energy, difference, and computation. it will feature two handmade solar panels as inputs to a 1 bit adder implemented via transistors wired as digital logic gates on a pile of dirt. it is a meditation on the conservation of energy and the definition of information as the relation between concentrations and absence.
the adder takes the form of a tangled net of low-cost wire and transistors, the so called base-unit of computational materiality. the handmade photovoltaic materials will be the result of an exploration of low-cost fabrication techniques for solar energy harvesting, which is in progress, and will either take the form of dye-sensitized titanium dioxide plates or wire-woven nets of factory damaged silicon cells.
the piece aims meant to provoke the viewer into interrogating the false separation between “energy” that can be “used” for “work” and the gradient between pattern, information, noise, and ambience. by merging the uses of electrical difference for both entropic sensory expenditure as light as well as harvested as the expression of binary information. the visuality of the piece is intends to exist at the limits of fragility: physically collapsible and conceptually dissolvable. it is our hope that sunadd is quickly forgotten.

Classes

Energy, Homemade Hardware