Light
Installation
Project
Notes
It’s an installation that uses the principles of Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter’s invention — the photophone of 1880. The invention uses sunbeams to transmit sound in free air.
We have not determined the location of the installation as of yet. It will be a large walk in ‘photophone’ that will not use any electricity — a Russian Constructivist intervention infiltrated by steam punk aesthetics — using solar light, heliostats, flexible mirrors and lampblack to send and receive sound.
If the embed is not working find the link to the draft video here:
http://vimeo.com/82858537 The password is “soundlight”
The SoundLight project will be set up in a public area. We will use two specially designed and constructed large mechanical heliostat devices as well as glass | water focus sphere lenses to direct sunlight onto the transmitting mirrors.
A heliostat (from helios, the Greek word for sun, and stat, as in stationary) is a device that includes a mirror, usually a plane mirror, which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating for the sun's apparent motions in the sky.
The target in our case will be the transmitting mirror microphone wireless sound light transmitter. To do this, the reflective surface of the mirror is kept perpendicular to the bisector of the angle between the directions of the sun and the target as seen from the mirror. The target is stationary relative to the heliostat, so the light is reflected in a fixed direction.
According to contemporary sources the heliostata, as it was called at first, was invented by Willem 's Gravesande (1688-1742). Other contenders are Giovanni Alonso Borelli (1608-1679) and Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736).
