Artemis HUARA – black and white

Artemis HUARA – black and white

In the beginning, the light available to humans came only from the stars – the sun and its reflection on the moon. For millennial humanity he accepted his inability to see in the dark and adapted accordingly to the natural rhythm of the celestial spheres, dawn and dusk. But that arrangement changed about 2 million years ago. The appearance of the controlled use of fire marked the beginning of the search for how to turn night into day at will. But getting light from burning things was very inefficient (heated rather than lighted) and inconvenient (smoke pollution). Then, about 70,000 years ago, light began to come from the burning of fuel: first animal fat, then oil or wax, or gas, and more recently kerosene not only allowed more efficient use of energy , but also introduced the need for a more specific light source design. The appearance of electricity at the end of the last century initiated a technological development which, regardless of the scientific principle used to produce light (incandescent, fluorescent or metal halides), almost made any other energy source disappear. The next step in the production of light came with the development of light emitting diodes (LEDs). For the first time, light has moved from the electrical realm to the field of electronics. But for some reason such a revolutionary step has not permeated society; people look for lights and lamps in the appliance section, not the electronics section. Our project for Artemide concerns the integration of the first and last moment in the history of light: the celestial spheres with electronics. On the one hand we want light to vary its intensity and direction according to the phases rather than moving the pieces of a mechanism. On the other hand, we want to acknowledge the fact that the future of light is electronic, not electric. The distinctive potential of electronics is its ability to carry information that allows for multiple modes of interaction, such as a touch screen. So, our design is a low-voltage, movable, intuitively touch-activated dark sphere. Hence the name Huara, the Aymarà word for star. Aymarà is the native population of the Acatama desert, the driest and darkest in the world. In other words, the place from which the most stars can be seen on the planet; it is no wonder that by 2020, 70% of the planet’s state-of-the-art astronomical observation capacity will be in the land of Aymara.