synthetic sunshine

The project began in Silicon Valley with a strong pull toward the Callanish Standing Stones and the mythical power they held for me. Traveling to Scotland became a pilgrimage to encounter the stones directly and create neon installations around the ancient stone circle. On my first day in Scotland, a crowd gathered on Calton Hill in Edinburgh to watch a solar eclipse and collectively orient themselves toward the Sun.

Estimated at 5,000 years old, Callanish represents an early moment when humans harnessed stone to create permanent structures and assert control over the natural world. By taking stone from the earth and reorienting it upward, these monuments give natural material an almost figurative, bodily presence. In this transformation, nature begins to take on a more human form. These humanized stones also become structures through which people reach toward something larger than themselves, in this case the Sun and questions of permanence and death. They become early expressions of an impulse that continues through later architecture such as skyscrapers. Human construction remains linked to the ancient desire to reach toward the Sun. There is a loop in this gesture: we reshape nature in our image and then use that transformed nature to imagine transcending our own limits. The site’s association with funerary rites further connects this desire for permanence and control to humanity’s attempts to contend with death. The project brings these ancient expressions of human power into contact with the technological power of the present.

Synthetic light disrupts the natural cycle of light and dark. It functions not metaphorically like the Sun but literally possesses the power to negate night and extend the day. What does it mean to exist in a culture capable of subverting the power of the Sun? 2015