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The Duwamish Lighthouse: Sensing & Communicating Sculpture Gives a Life to Industrial River

Friday, May 29 | 2:00 - 2:50pm
Room: Fuji Rooms 1-2

Speaker: George Lee, George Lee Studio LLC 

Description:

A barrage of problems with increasingly complex causes and solutions defines today. Water for example: It is 60% of us, but increasingly we are seeing that all water in the world is now toxic, rapidly changing in pH, filled with micro-plastics, etc. The interesting thing about water is that humans just see the beautiful surface. Even a polluted bay’s surface is beautiful. The toxicity is invisible, and this is a major challenge to the human short-term psychology and visual-comprehension biology. The Duwamish Lighthouse is a mechatronic sensing sculpture project installed late April 2015 that seeks to signal on behalf of the Duwamish industrial waterway to the human stewards around it. To bring visual understanding to its health, and an emotional life that humans may form an emotional relationship with. The piece is an industrial truss sculpture skinned in tyvek, illuminated according to real-time water quality data, on site and remotely, with Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Partners include the Port of Seattle.

Learning Objectives:
  • Aquire a basic introduction to affordable microcomputer technologies relevant to remote environmental sensing and data display.
  • Acquire new knowledge about research into human biology and psychology as relating to resiliency with complex problems.
  • Acquire new knowledge of durable, elegant materials for temporary or low cost structure creation.
  • Learn about multi agency alternative public art partnerships and funding mechanisms

Speaker Bio: George Lee, George Lee Studio LLC

George is an award-winning landscape designer and public artist focused on provocation/experimentation, storytelling, and regeneration. George brings vibrant ingredients from a diverse professional background, and has 5 years of landscape design and project management experience. This includes working internationally for award-winning firm Turenscape, winning 6 awards from UW-WASLA, and receiving several public art commissions in Seattle and the northwest. George also works for SvR design in Seattle.