2016
LED Christmas lights, RGB light strips, FM radio broadcaster, computer and lighting control hardware/software, unused historic villa, model of villa, 40 minutes of music and lighting compositions, radios
No One’s Home was a project commissioned for Lichtparcours 2016, a public sculpture festival occurring every 3–4 years in Braunschweig, Germany. Artists are invited to produce works involving light, which are installed throughout the city, focusing on a park created at the beginning of the nineteenth century, built from a moat and other obsolete city fortifications. As the site for my commission, I chose Gartenhaus Häckel, an abandoned villa located in the grounds of the public park. Despite being owned by the City of Braunschweig – thus a kind of public property itself – the public had never been given access to the building.
I installed Christmas lights and color-changing RGB strips onto the interior and exterior of the building, and animated these to a 40-minute soundtrack I wrote for the work. The music has a menacing feel, inspired by the synthesizer soundtracks written by John Carpenter for his own horror films. Visitors were invited into the villa and its grounds, to wander among the flashing lights, listening to the eerie music coming from FM radios sited in various rooms. On the top floor of the villa was a model used to create the animations, as well as the FM broadcaster for the soundtrack.
The Christmas lights suggested a link between Lichtparcours and the commercialization of Christmas, simultaneously celebratory events underwritten with economic motives. The project created a fun house from the horror of abandoned civic property, a publicly owned yet unused building in a climate of increasing housing costs and decreasing social housing, surrounded by a lighting festival operated by the city as an economic driver. No One’s Home operates in contrast to the Richard Florida model of utopian civic cultural engagement pointing to realities of the ebbs and flows of capital leading to dystopic ruins in shared civic space.