Kinetic sculptures and sound circuits: building sun-powered artwork at Pioneer Works

In 2014, multimedia artist Alex Nathanson co-curated a assignment known as Nightlight that grew to become a garden in Queens into an interactive light exhibit. The team had was hoping to electricity the exhibit by way of jogging a cable out, but that turned out now not to be possible, and “sun energy became the solution.”

Since then, Nathanson has been inquisitive about the intersection of solar strength and artwork. He controlled Sunset, a Central Park artwork set up that consisted of a sun-powered ice cream truck, and he now teaches training on art and engineering. During two recent Sundays, college students at Pioneer Works, an artwork area in Brooklyn, learned to make sun-powered robots and occasional-voltage sound sculptures.

According to Nathanson, many large “sun installations” are sincerely connected to the grid, so it’s vital to him that some thing claiming to be “sun-powered art” absolutely uses practical solar cells in preference to merely speculating approximately how the cells might be used, or using the cells simplest as decoration. To achieve this is greenwashing that erases the possibility of the usage of sun substances to find out about bodily craft and possible solutions to climate trade, he says.

In Nathanson’s magnificence, the students — who don’t want prior engineering enjoy — used upcycled sun cells from Jameco that came in a selection of shapes. The sound project had 3 components: build the sound circuit, construct the sun panel itself, and then join the two. To execute this, the students discovered engineering standards (like collection and parallel circuits, volts and amps, calculating output) in addition to technical abilties (along with the way to use a soldering iron).