I was commissioned to make this installation by the Knoxville Museum of Art as the entrance to their newly revamped kid’s gallery in 2007. The idea was to create a sort of lichenous metallic growth on the wall, a mixture of nature and industry that the kids could interact with. There are sound generators (simple square wave analog circuits using 555 timer chips that are controlled by Infrared distance sensors) on either side of the entrance. The sound also goes through an analog effect that is controlled by a second sensor. My partner in this endeavour was Matt Roberts. We conceived and built this in a little over a month. As the day of the installation was coming (the day before the big unveiling of the new gallery space) we realized we were running out of time and kept working longer and longer hours. Finally we worked the last 50 hours non-stop basically. We showed up and installed it all bleary eyed and exhausted. We hadn’t even had a trial run. We had never assembled it before as we didn’t have a space big enough!! Well it all went well, the museum was happy, kids liked the installation and we went home and slept!
We are both very proud of this work, although it was a bit rough around the edges, we did it very quickly and with almost no money.