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ART & DESIGN / PROFILE design file


JOE O’CONNELL & BLESSING HANCOCK


“We don’t just work with light,” says Joe O’Connell, who with Blessing Hancock makes up one part of an artistic team currently bringing LED light art to public spaces in Tucson, Arizona. “We try to use light and interactivity in a meaningful way.”


Joe O’Connell, a technologist with an inter- est in living systems, and Blessing Hancock, a sculptor, have won praise for their site specific project work, which seeks to fill some of the American South’s many empty spaces.


Ballroom Luminoso is one such project. The artwork sought to reinvent the grim underbelly of a freeway overpass, of which there are many in the United States, con- crete relics of the Eisenhower years that cut across cities, splicing communities and neighbourhoods in half. The neighbourhood in Tucson that hosted the project is home to a mixed Anglo and Hispanic community and the project aimed to create a meeting place for two cultures to come together.


“It occurred to us,” says O’Connell, “that ballroom dancing is common to both communities and when we first looked at the underpass, we noticed it had beautiful concrete work and was very well done, with a kind of formal elegance to it, like an


abandoned dancehall.”


The fixtures completely revolutionise the space, turning an ignored and undervalued area into a place to meet and have fun. “You don’t have to wait for it to be dark to feel the effect of the place either,” O’Con- nell adds. “We believe in using LED lighting for purposes it is uniquely suited to, so we like to use point sources and the brightest possible emitters that we can, coming from the smallest possible area to cast very sharp shadows.” And the shadows lend the ball- room an almost gothic feel, brightened by the sparkling fixtures and the bright colours of a youthful populace entranced. O’Connell and Hancock used LEDs from a US based manufacturer for the project and then created their own electronics. “There were no commercial fixtures we just had to take the raw LEDs and then figure out how to do the thermal management and seal them against environmental conditions and control them.” In his practice, O’Connell has found that the


All images: Lucas Conrad and Fred Gonzales © 2013 Joe O’Connell & Blessing Hancock Public Art


fixtures that house LEDs are often lagging slightly behind the advances in LED technol- ogy. “For the most part, with the exception of strip lights, we are finding it hard to use commercially available fixtures that do what we want, although we keep looking. Most of our expense goes into engineering our own fixtures.”


For the Ballroom Luminoso project six fixtures were used, each boasting four LED emitters, with each emitter costing around twenty or thirty dollars. This is in com- parison to the $2000 spent on labour and materials for the fixtures themselves. Fish Bellies is another project that has been singled out for praise. Created for the Texas State University and inspired by the San Marcos River that has it source on campus, Fish Bellies features layers of frosted acrylic and utilises LED strip lights made to the art- ists’ specifications. Embedded in each belly are two touch-sensitive controllers, which allow the public to transform the piece by curating the colour and saturation levels of


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