DONATE YOUR BURNT OUT INCANDESCENT LIGHT BULBS! We’re accepting bulbs from now until the end of August, 2012.

After much (characteristic) beating around the bush, I’ve finally launched a much belated LIGHT BULB DRIVE. Such a huge parts of this project – at least, as it stands at the moment – relies on a large mass of light bulbs. If you think about it, the entire canopy of my 18 foot cloud needs to be covered in globular clusters of bulbs – that’s 18ft x 7ft times 4 and 7ft x 10ft times 2. You do the math.

I use “needs” loosely – art is an interesting thing in that there are so many choices. I could have chosen to make CLOUD out of balloons, or cotton, or Tupperware. Whatever! Each of these choices could have been arbitrary. But when I started thinking about what an electrical cloud is (a flickering, mysterious mass above us) and the symbolic meaning of clouds and light bulbs for me (head in the clouds = whimsical and living in your own imagination. Imagination = full of ideas. Idea = light bulb!) light bulbs started to make more and more sense.

Burnt out light bulbs specifically were suggested to me by my Engineer Mentors, Jason and Evan. Initially, all of CLOUD’s bulbs were supposed to light up. That was, until Evan and Jason unanimously stated that the sculpture would be so goddamn bright that there’s NO WAY a regular public audience could properly look at it. Clouds don’t look like that, they said. Clouds are more diffused – softer. Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but that was the essence of it. And so the idea to use burnt out light bulbs was born. And now I need a TON of them…. which is where you (the general public who are hopefully reading this) come in. That, and I’ve e-mailed every demolition company in the city… hopefully one of them wants to put me in touch with all those magical light bulbs just sitting in homes waiting for eventual demolition. Untapped art materials, yo!

But anyways, DONATE YOUR BURNT OUT INCANDESCENT LIGHT BULBS! and you’ll earn my undying gratitude.