Buried Light
Rachel Wingfield, Hiaz Gimachi, Greta Corke
Buried light is an ambient display concept presented, as an installation, at the V&A's Friday Night Late View on the 27th of March 2004. This installation uses wallpaper as a surface that visualizes dynamic information about domestic energy consumption. The surface of the wallpaper mediates the daily usage of electrical power through aesthetic patterns that continually change. During the exhibition spectators could interact with domestic appliances that would in turn affect the patterns presented on the wallpaper.
Creative Contribution
What was the significant innovation in approach or thinking behind the project/artwork? How can this be recognisably attributed to the involvement of creative practice?
One innovation in this project is the demonstration of how interior surfaces, such as walls, can be used to represent ambient information about domestic energy usage and consumption. Thus, the surfaces become points of interaction between the inhabitant of a building and its energy dynamics.
There are two attributes of creative practice in this project. Firstly the transformation of quantitative data into ambient aesthetic representations of energy and secondly using a traditionally 'creative' medium, illustration and wallpaper, to mediate energy information.
Collaboration
What were the disciplinary contributors to the project? What model of research / development was followed? What were factors leading to success / problems?
This project is an outcome of the collaboration between textiles designer, researcher and academic Rachel Wingfield (based at Central Saint Martins) and the artist Mathias Gmachl, a research associate at the Royal College of Art. Their collaborative project, Loop.ph, was created to act as a site to develop new and responsive textiles and structures and has worked on architectural and fashion commissions to product design. They conduct a range of research activities and collaborate with industry and multi-disciplinary groups.
Buried Light forms part of the collaborative research practices of Rachel and Mathias Gmachl where designers and artists seek to collaborate with industrial partners and scientific collaborators in what we might call sci-art interdisciplinary work. 

Values
What were the outcomes of the project? How were these disseminated to outside stakeholders? What models of value are implied by this project? What was the Impact of the work?
A proposal for an interactive wallpaper. Buried light was presented at exhibition at the V&A museum.
The implications of this project are that manufacturers of non-interactive domestic products, such as wallpaper, have an opportunity to collaborate with designers in order to produce interactive and energy related consumer products. It also implies that domestic decorative arts can be transformed into information communication touch points.
Buried Light forms part of the continued research output of Loop.ph. The impact of the work lies in demonstrating to academic and industrial audiences how textiles and technology, craft based practices and scientific related technologies can be combined to create new research forms, products and proposals.
Links and Resources
http://www.loop.ph/bin/view/Loop/BuriedLight
http://www.loop.ph/bin/view/Loop/WebHome
