This exhibition enables visitors to explore various forms of electricity, and to experience and reflect on energy consumption. Some of Sweden’s best known artists and designers have been brought together with engineers, technical know-how and environmental consideration in this ground breaking exhibition. The exhibition presents concepts and prototypes which are results of several years of interdisciplinary research at the Interactive Institute as well as art installations. You will see electricity as never seen before. By the Swedish Institute and the Interactive Institute.
Upcoming show at: Miraikan, Tokyo
Energy AWARE Clock
Energy AWARE Clock is an electricity meter that resembles an ordinary kitchen clock.
Energy AWARE Clock is designed to make energy awareness a part of everyday life. The clock visualises the daily energy rhythms of the household and reminds us of the ordinary kitchen clock, both in form, place and use. Take a glance at your Energy AWARE Clock - in the same way you glance at the clock every now and then – and be enlightened. Energy AWARE Clock shows electrical utilisation of its environment in real time. If the dishwasher is switched on it shows immediately on the display of the unit. Yesterday’s graphs fade away slowly and today’s consumption is drawn on top of previous days, making it possible to compare your energy use for several periods.
- Year: 2006-2008
- Project: AWARE – Design for Energy Awareness, Interactive Institute
- Project team: Loove Broms, Karin Ehrnberger, Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Erika Lundell, Jin Moen
- Press images
AWARE Laundry Lamp
AWARE Laundry Lamp is a combined drying rack and a lamp.
AWARE Laundry Lamp is a combined drying rack and a lamp
AWARE Laundry Lamp is an attempt to combine positive symbols and activities such as hang-drying your clothes outside in the sun, with designing your own lampshade. Go even further, and make a statement with the kind of laundry you put on display. Through this feature, the design comments on the fact that 95 percent of the electricity used in a traditional light bulb is transferred to heat, and only 5 percent to light. Since the creation of AWARE Laundry Lamp, this type of matte lightbulb has been outlawed in the European Union and is not manufactured anymore. The design of the lamp encourages hang-drying instead of tumble-drying clothes, another alternative of drastically reducing electricity consumption on a large scale. Tumble dryers are one of the greatest consumers of electricity at home.
- Year: 2006–2008
- Project: AWARE – Design for Energy Awareness, Interactive Institute
- Project team: Loove Broms, Karin Ehrnberger, Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Erika Lundell, Jin Moen
- Press images
Flower Lamp
The Flower Lamp builds on an increasingly prevalent technology – remote energy metering – to visualise electricity used in the household as a whole.
It is not just the light of the Flower Lamp – but its actual form – that reflects energy consumption in the home. Rather than showing how many watts are consumed at any given time, its shape is responsive to the overall trend in consumption. With a decrease in household electrical use, the Flower Lamp slowly opens up and appears to ‘bloom’. If, on the other hand, energy consumption increases, the lamp closes into a more contracted form, which also affects the quality of light emitted. Thus, both the light and form of the lamp reflect behavioural tendencies within a household. In order to make the Flower Lamp more beautiful, a collective change in behaviour is needed.
- Year: 2004–2006
- Project: Static! – Design for Increased Energy Awareness, Interactive Institute.
- Project team: Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren, Katja Sävström, Göran Nordahl. Technical modifactions by: Anton Gustafsson, Fredrik Kronqvist.
- Press images
Energy Curtain
The Energy Curtain is a window shade woven from a combination of textile, solar-collection and light-emitting materials.
The Energy Curtain reinterprets our familiar relation to curtains as a means of controlling the light in a room – but with a conceptual twist. The curtain must be drawn shut to collect light, and the amount and duration that is drawn during the day determines how much light is collected for the night. Users must make a choice – whether to open the curtain and enjoy the daylight, or to close it and save energy for later. Thus, even the mundane act of opening or closing the curtain embodies the trade-off between consuming and conserving energy. Each and every day, it requires that its users reflect and act upon this trade-off – literally placing the cyclical transformation of energy into their hands.
- Year: 2004–2006
- Project: Static! – Design for Increased Energy Awareness, Interactive Institute
- Project team: Anders Ernevi, Margot Jacobs, Ramia Mazé, Carolin Müller, Johan Redström, Linda Worbin.
- Press images
Power Aware Cord
The Power Aware Cord is designed to visualise the energy of the current use of electricity of the appliances connected with it through glowing pulses, flow, and intensity of light.
In everyday life we are surrounded by energy at all times. The TV set might be using electricity all night long without us noticing. The mobile phone charger is an energy thief that is easy to forget. The Power Aware Cord may be used as a ‘tool’ for people to rediscover energy in their homes as well as an ambient ‘display’ to see energy consumption at a glance at any given time. For instance, the effects of changing the volume on stereo equipment becomes immediately and dramatically apparent – as do appliances that are silently stealing electricity while on standby.
- Year: 2004–2006
- Project: Static! – Design for Increased Energy Awareness, Interactive Institute
- Project team: Anton Gustafsson, Magnus Gyllenswärd, Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Christina Öhman. In collaboration with ThinLight AB.
- Press images
Nils Edvardsson: The Spirit of High Voltage
Looking at the ubiqutiy of the power line, covering both the rural and the urban, the cultivated and the wild in Sweden, the artist Nils Edvardsson began to regard these lines as an enormous string instrument and he set himself the task of recording the sounds that these lines produce in the transmissions and connections of this flow across the land. The result is a dynamic score where sounds of the electricity, the wind and the environment around the lines constitute the orchestra.
- Year: 2008
- Project team: Nils Edvardsson (artist), Fredrik Norrgren (sound engineer)
- Press images
Steven Dixon and Tore Nilsson: Mezzo
Artists Steven Dixon and Tore Nilsson explore a large number of images they associate with energy and the many themes this has given rise to in the human mind and beliefs. On 24 small monitors images flicker, pause, return, creating an open fabric of the meanings of energy from the beginnings of the ideas of amber and static electricity to the electro-magnetic pulse of the earth, and forming for the viewer an open field for a myriad reflections of what energy could be and what meanings it could yield.When you approach the installation, audio is triggered becoming louder and stronger as one comes closer to the monitors. The kinetic energy of the viewer is translated into the power and clarity that the sounds are given.
- Year: 2008
- Project team: Steven Dixon (artist), Tore Nilsson (artist), Patrik Axelsson and Gunnar Camner from Physical Interaction Lab (engineers)
- Press images
Tina Finnäs: Like There Was No Tomorrow
Four plexiglas modules, artificial plants and a sun. Together they create an oasis where a small, pulsing activity can be discerned. The activity might be more intense, since the installation constantly gets input from a carbon dioxide meter. The more carbon dioxide in the room the more activity – the plants will grow and the light will be more intense. Like There Was No Tomorrow visualises life and eternity, a dawn when everything is born and dusk when the sun sets. The installation follows this cycle, from sunrise to sunset, to the tones of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Finnäs still wants to remind us that this is a fragile beauty. The Earth is a resource we borrow but also rapidly consume.
- Year: 2008
- Project team: Tina Finnäs (artist), Erik Sjödin (engineer), Henrik Berggren and Rouzbeh Delavari from Physical Interaction Lab (engineers). In collaboration with Johan Strandahl, Klajdi Shoshi, ELFA and SenseAir.
- Press images
Production
Curation & Project Planning: Interactive Institute
Production Manager: Christina Öhman, Interactive Institute
Exhibition design and production: Mu AB
Graphical design: Mu AB
Exhibition Manager: Anna Maria Bernitz, Swedish Institute and Magnus Jonsson, Interactive Institute
Art curator and catalogue editor: Björn Norberg
Sponsors
