Domestic Light, a multi-year, globally-networked, participatory project by award-winning video artist & Sussex Humanities Lab Associate Ian Winters, celebrates its launch on the summer solstice at SFArtsED Gallery at Minnesota Street Projects, and online via Zoom.

At SFArtsED Gallery, Winters’ live, yearlong video installation will open at 12 noon. Audiences can join on Zoom and  have the chance to celebrate the launch of the Domestic Light website alongside leaders from partnering organizations Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Leonardo/ISAST (with funding from the Creative Work Fund), Sussex Humanities Lab, and SFArtsED.

With Domestic Light, Winters works across data science and network art, Light And Space Art, and performance to explore the disparity between how natural light is perceived and mediated, and the nature and character of its networked relations. The project offers a new way of noticing how our bodies build the notion of home and the passage of time– based on the qualities of light where we live– and how mediated images of nature are sensitizing us as a species. The structured data set generated by Domestic Light will be archived at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab and will be available for public use by artists and researchers. 

Winters collaborated with data scientist Weidong Yang to create custom multi-spectral color sensors and distributed them to a participatory network of households in a maximum number of time zones around the world. Recording the shifting character of domestic light worldwide, the real time data collected from these sensors drives a time lapse video installation (also viewable on the project website), creating a real time color portrait of “home”– both domestic and planetary– over the 2023 - 2024 solar year.

Beginning on the 2023 solstice, video displays will be presented in the gallery and on the Domestic Light website. In 2024, the project will culminate in an immersive installation, a live audio/visual performance by Winters and composer/performer Pamela Z using sound contributed by sensor hosts, and a special section in Leonardo Journal. https://domesticlight.art/

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