With the Light Vehicle in 1968, I bit off more than I could chew by adding  electricity to my palette.  The year-long disaster of that experience convinced me that until I learned more electronics, I needed to attempt less ambitious projects.  Also, the abrupt random wanderings of the Light Vehicle hipped me that movement had its own aesthetic rules.  Chastened, I embarked on a systematic investigation of limited kinetic relationships.   I further resolved to keep the electronics simple.  Over the next two years, the resultant studies created 20 related artworks called Wheels and Pendulums.  These "studies" involved interactions of oscillating rods (pendulums and rotating circles (wheels).  Various parameters - weights, counter-weights, fulcrums, radial attachments, diameters and spring tensions were adjusted until the overall behavior of the particular group became  non-repeating and unpredictable.  Lacking storage space, I reluctantly destroyed most of them.  The studies culminated in Double Loop Feedback Tower (1972), an award-winner exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  The next 4 years were filled with various commissioned excursions into the use of electronics to sense physical events and create  movements, sounds and illuminations.   At the beginning of the six year expedition into this new territory,  I hid the electrical components in boxes or obscurely embedded behind physical elements of the work such as panels or dense walls of welded wires.   But gradually, with increased use of integrated circuits, the beauty of the electronic parts became apparent.  
 Printed circuit board stock itself became available in more colors than green.  Imagery in other colors can be silk-screened onto it.  The patterns of conductive electronic pathways can be drawn freehand with pen and ink.  Artistic incorporation of the electronics became irresistible until finally they comprised the main visuals of the mirror-backed multiple,  Song For Luke.




   Song For Luke (1976)
*edition of 15 and counting
 Photo-resistive cells, two round red buttons, resemble breasts of an ancient fertility goddess.  The square of sixty-four LEDs veiled by a pane of red acrylic and surmounted by three coronal knobs may reference the Christian Virgin Mother whose portrait St.Luke was alleged to have painted. The silvery conductive paths of the integrated circuits, transistors and resistors form a decorative tracery.   That the function of the circuitry - Opposing light/dark sensors drive a 16 bucket brigade of logic states to animate a block of 64 LEDs - can be imbued with symbolic meaning.

*edition of 15 and counting





Oriental Landscape (1979)
  Oriental Landscape, Time's Flower and Moon Bark are three artworks made in the late 1970s that use a 36 bit binary counter to animate  144 lights in a mandala.    In Time's Flower and Oriental Landscape the counter advances as it counts oscillations of its light sensing circuit.  More info on Oriental Landscape

Time's Flower (1977)

As ambient light increases, the frequency of the oscillations does also.  The circuit's frequency ranges between 2 (complete dark) and 16 per second (sunlight).   If the artwork is allowed to run uninterrupted counting at an average rate of 8 per second,   Its mandala will display 68,719,476,735 different symmetrical patterns in about 233 1/2 years before it will start over.  If power to the artwork is interrupted, it starts over.