I have always had an obsession with mechanics. The eccentric cam is my favourite as it is one of the earliest forms of programming, encoding a particular movement into a shape when turned. As lighting increasingly turns to digital data driven “smart” solutions I sought to store and customise lighting data in a novel way.

As COVID dominated our routines I observed a monotony setting in, a familiar home environment instilling routines with little variation. I wanted to introduce some novelty to the lighting in our lives and so drew on natural forms like rocks to decide the colour of lighting in spaces. A rock found on the ground and placed as part of the mechanism, moves a slider up and down according to its geometry, and so moves a coloured acetate sheet in front of a light source.

A rock that has been eroded for millions of years ends up briefly dictating the colour of the light in a room, this “data” generated over all those years. These rocks can then be returned to the world or kept as “programs” for different light cycles. This made me consider the possibility for users to mould clay shapes themselves, creating and storing the programs that dictate their lighting routines by hand. This is an antithesis to smart devices that store data in servers out of our control, extending to devices as simple as lightbulbs. I hope to explore the potential to play with data in this way more in future.