Brooklyn Designers' Flowers Will Electrify Manchester

An interactive garden shows electricity usage in real time

Brooklyn, NY (PRWEB) May 19, 2009 -- The Futuresonic Festival and Conference in Manchester, England delivers Brooklyn based found material artists Megan MacMurray and Angela Pablo to showcase their Garden Electric exhibit from May 13th to May 23rd, 2009. We use electricity all the time, but it's a hidden process contained in plugs and kept behind walls. The garden visualizes electricity usage through the life and death of its plants. These devices indicate electricity usage in real time, to make energy consumption visible and palpable.

The Garden's flowers, constructed from recycled plastic bags, are connected to a lamp through a current sensor which reads the amount of power being consumed. This value triggers fans which inflate and deflate the garden as a whole. When the lamp is turned off and energy is conserved, the garden thrives and stays inflated; when the lamp is on, the garden is placed in a dying state. The Garden Electric invites visitors to interact with it by turning appliances on and off, allowing electricity to take on a tactile form.

Designers by day, found material artists by night, Megan MacMurray and Angela Pablo have worked together since their schooling at the prestigious Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. The Garden Electric was the artists' first collaborative project and they have been working on video, animation and physical projects together ever since. The duo are also contributors to Greensearch, a search engine and blog focusing on green and tech issues that helps generate money from advertising towards a different environmental non-profit each month. "We have amazingly similar aesthetics and work styles", says Megan MacMurray. "We love clean, somewhat kitschy styles that take the mundane and bring it to life."

Garden Electric was created within constraints, both self-imposed and external. Originally the artists were looking for a tangible way to represent electricity without using electricity--outside of what they were measuring. Within that process they also focused on using materials that had the least amount of impact in their creation. Ms. MacMurray explains, "When trying to find used materials which were in excess in New York City and we didn't need to look past the plastic grocery bag. This overwhelming excess is represented by the number of projects we've seen made from these 3 minute products." Mac Murray refers to the 3 minute time frame it takes to walk from the store to a person's home or office with the plastic bag, only to throw it away. "Both Angela Pablo and I love making beauty from trash, finding use in waste and the creative re-purpose of everyday objects," MacMurray adds. This became the focus of the project, with a parallel goal of making the invisible negative effects of sources of energy tangible. The colors, structure and setup of the project is simple, interactive and fun to experience.

Relevant Links:
http://www.futuresonic.com/macmurray-pablo
http://gardenelectric.com/
http://greensear.ch
http://core-industries.com

Contact:
Daniel Schutzsmith
Director of New Business
Core Industries
Phone: +1 888 645 1333 x110
daniel(at)core-industries.com

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