Allan Giddy: Hours Remaining in the Life of Allan Giddy

Title:

Hours Remaining in the Life of Allan Giddy

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

1992

Medium:

Electronic components, LCD’s, solar panels, pillow, chair, light bulb, broken light bulb

Size:

50cm + 50cm + 100cm

Artist Statement:

This work is the second I have constructed to deal with this (light-based) theme.lt is a digital construction. “Die verbleibende Stunden im Leben des Allan Giddy” is a backwards counting machine. I calculated how many hours I would have left to live based on the average for a New Zealand male born in the 1960’s, this I then programmed into my small machine and set it running. I took care, allowing the machine to retain memory (using capacitance) during “night-sleep” periods when the display disappears while the “machine” counts more slowly. Somewhat more theoretical than “CLOCK”, this piece, while counting the hours remaining until my presumed demise, is in fact an autonomous agent, freed from its maker while contracting its rhythms and pace towards demise from its independent reaction to the light around it.

Both pieces (Clock and Hours Remaining in the Life of Allan Giddy) are provoked by Rudolph Steiner’s questionable statement,”everything in the universe is made from light”. I hypothesised that if everything was indeed made of light it would therefore be deconstructed by light’s incessive bombardment, and that the time that this deconstruction would take, for any given mass and light intensity, could be calculated. With this in mind I constructed a device capable of ‘evaporating’ a round of wood. After consulting physics Professor, John Smith of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, I came to realize that this deconstruction did in fact take place with many materials.