Published on: March 26, 2009

Gorbet Design Inc is a creative team of designers working with innovative experimental art and invigorates environments. They send us their project Solar Collector which exploits sun energy and uses it during nighttime for it’s unique performance of light.

Here is what Gorbet Design team said about their project:

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SOLAR COLLECTOR

-         a solar-powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture

-         a collaboration between the community and the sun

In an industrial setting in Cambridge, Ontario, twelve aluminum shafts rise at surprising angles from a grassy hill. They hang over the landscape at increasingly acute angles, creating a graceful curve that appears to unfold for passing motorists.

On each shaft are three solar panels, along with three sets of lights.  The custom light fixtures are made from 432 reclaimed glass WWII tank periscope prisms, sandblasted and edge-lit with six white LEDs each.

SOLAR ENERGY AND HUMAN EXPRESSION

During the day, the solar panels along the top surface of each shaft collect the sun’s energy into individual batteries located within the shaft.  While the solar panels are charging the batteries, Solar Collector also gathers human expression. Using a simple online interface, people choreograph waves of light into compositions that will become part of Solar Collector’s nightly performance.

Each night at dusk, a performance begins of all the compositions collected that day. From quick, flashing pulses to slow, flowing waves, the submitted patterns are linked to create the first part of the evening’s performance. After the patterns collected each day are displayed, the performance moves on to the second part, a series composed algorithmically from all the patterns ever created.

The length of each day’s performance reflects the sunlight and the seasons, as the shafts use up the day’s collected energy and fade out late in the evening, one by one.

THE SUN AS INSPIRATION

The sculpture’s form makes visible the graceful geometry of solar energy.

The angles of the shafts reflect the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest, most upright shaft is perpendicular to the sun’s rays at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The shortest, most acutely angled shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.

The light compositions are made up of sine waves – the mathematical basis for sun’s motion through the sky and for the propagation of light.  The lengths of the shafts also follow a sine wave, as they are calculated from the number of sunlight hours through the year.

Constructed from industrial materials but taking its inspiration from the forms of nature, Solar Collector speaks to the intersection between the natural and the industrial.  Wielding the sun’s energy, participants combine the power of nature and the potential of technology in inspired expressions of global belonging and concern.

The comments submitted along with the compositions range from descriptive naming of the patterns to messages of environmental hope to the joy people feel at being able to reach halfway around the world (or down the street) and create a pattern to flash across the Canadian sky.