What is it?
Interactive: Gently touch one of 25 hanging copper “atoms” in this installation to trigger a collision of light.
Each is made with a used copper gasket from the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector installed at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. These gaskets are crushed within vacuum fittings and must be replaced each time the fitting is opened.
In this artwork, the gaskets are used as capacitive touch sensors. They are paired with custom circuit boards, designed by the artist and fabricated in Shenzhen, which gleam brightly when touched—and send a shockwave of light through nearby Little Ones.
They are suspended from a lattice of copper tubing and powered from a single overhead power supply; the Little Ones communicate with an ad-hoc 802.11 wireless mesh network.
“Little ones” is a literal translation of the word “neutrino.” In this work, I am imagining that viewers are in the position of being a neutrino, a tiny subatomic particle that rarely interacts with atoms; it is up to a viewer whether or not to engage.
