Various art projects
While I was still learning how to make LCDs, I was very excited about electronic jewelry in general. Although their effect was nowhere near as subtle or as interesting to me as LCD panels, I created several jewels around this time that used light emitting diodes (LEDs) as their output device. While it is common to see people wearing flashing LEDS today, that was definitely not the case in 1975 and these items invariably attracted a great deal of attention when worn.
In another experiment, I created "ear domes" that completely encased the ears and fed them an audio tone that changed according to light intensity. In the image at right, I am wearing the ear domes, along with eye domes made from thermoformed acrylic. Wearing these items went beyond ornament into sensory modification for the wearer. At this time, I had not yet discovered titanium, but was disenchanted with precious metals, so a lot of my early experimental jewels were made of acrylic; not all of them were electronic. The two gold items are computer graphics jewels. The art for them was done on a Macintosh computer and the pattern was then pounded into silver foil by running it through a dot matrix printer.
Although working primarily as a jewelry artist, I also made some LCD sculptures, many of which used ambient light as their power source. LCDs are a low power technology, so they are ideal for such light powered devices.
In the mid 70s I was also very interested in lasers and holography. It is common to see lasers in the public sphere today, but at the time I made the laser gun it was quite exotic. The power supply made an almost ultrasonic hum- perfect for a ray gun. I found the whole concept of holography fascinating and made several experimental holographic sculptures. The one here is unusual, because it is combined in the same optical space with a physically real object.
Here are some high voltage (Kirlian) photographs. There were made using a 40,000 volt elecrical generator to apply such voltages to various articles that were then placed in direct contact with the film. The circular feature in "kirlian2" is my finger tip. Yes, I had 40,000 volts passing through it! Unfortunately, these are old Polaroid prints and they have degraded.
In the early 90s, I experimented with a variety of houseware items. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.
