Solar Pipeline/Public Sun/Arendt's Table, 2020
Public Sun/Arendt’s Table was a sculptural installation for Beyond the World's End, curated by T.J. Demos, at the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, opening: March 6, 2020. The solar pipeline consists of one to four stacked sections lit by natural light from a skylight. Each section supports a transparent red fiber optic material developed by researchers Sue Carter and Glen Alers in Santa Cruz, and implemented in experimental greenhouses. This material transforms green light into red, generating an electric charge and providing a selectively enhanced light spectrum that supports photosynthesis. The glowing drawings created on the red material represent diatoms, microscopic ocean organisms with bodies composed of silica instead of carbon, the remains of which created California's unusual oil shale deposits (the Monterey shale).
Solar Pipeline is an independent sculpture that can be adapted to an indoor space with a light source.
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes the public realm abstractly as that which “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.” This “common world” as she called it necessarily relates and also separates—allows us to feel and negotiate our differences while sharing the same space, and deters us from withdrawing into privacy and isolation in the face of conflict. The installation at the MAH proposed to re-create Arendt’s table as a model for a common world and public realm that expands beyond Arendt’s humanist perspective to include non-humans, and the non-living, material world, in the process of planning for a just and sustainable future fueled by solar energy. The pink table in the installation represents only a fraction of the multispecies worlds with whom we share relations.