Meet the Artist: Tiffany Holmes

darkSky

       Strolling through the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, you stare blankly at an art piece titled “Stains,” and ask yourself how in the world different types of fluids, ketchup, dirt, spit, spilled onto a plain white sheet of paper could be considered “art.” You continue on, baffled, and step right up to what seems to be a blank 8 by 8 inch canvas, that is until you spot a strand of long brown hair carefully glued and dangling from the upper right corner. Now fully convinced contemporary art is so not your thing, you are snatched out of confusion and drawn toward the light, literally, emanating from a small room around the corner.  Without thinking you wander into the room and find yourself amongst a table full of salvaged white lamps and gleaming light bulbs. Encouraged by other museum strollers doing the same, you step up and delicately turn the metal knob, switching off one lamp at a time. In minutes, you dance around the room switching off all the lamps, as though turning a light off isn’t the mundane everyday task it usually is. In the darkness you have created, a sleek black monitor on the wall reveals tiny fireflies moving about the screen, joyfully reminiscent of night before city lights and cars. Without even realizing, you become a part of this contemporary work of art by Tiffany Holmes titled darkSky, and instinctually understand the feeling and emotion behind the work through a simple visualization of how we use, and abuse, energy.

Watch the fireflies on the monitor when all the lights are off.

            Crossing the preconceived boundary of art and social or scientific commentary, media artist Tiffany Holmes explores the budding possibility of art and technology to cause environmental change.  Working from the term “ecovisualization”, Holmes’ work uses art or design, be it photographic collages or digitally interactive media, to capture and share the ecological problem our global community suffers and generate new perceptions in order to widen the public sphere of understanding. In the installation darkSky, Holmes creates an effective way to visualize our energy consumption from the relationship between turning off lamps, a task we do every day, and a nostalgic digital display of fireflies that only comes out at night, or when the 60 watt light bulbs do not consume energy. Through this tangible interaction, museum visitors participate one-on-one with electricity, and in turn, walk away with the ability to conceptualize our individual energy use far better than attempting to decode data and numbers often foreign to us when the energy bill arrives in the mail.
            Another important aspect of this piece is the individual choice of whether or not to have the installation consume large or small quantities of electricity; this personal choice encourages the visitor to think for themselves about the impact their actions have on energy consumption, and in turn the greater environment. For this reason, art plays a crucial role in our sustainable future, for it allows all people, even those who do not believe in climate change, to look and interact with environmental reality from a different angle. Interactive and meaningful art like Holmes’ plants the seeds for a new era of understanding and personal responsibility of our resource consumption, just one step toward a post-carbon city life without fossil fuels, and with happiness and caring for our environment and each other. Breaking away from the so-called “meaningful art” plaguing the contemporary art world (what exactly is a stain on a piece of paper trying to tell me?), Holmes’s art redefines what successful contemporary art is today: a revealing interaction between an individual and ecological information greatly affecting our global society and environment for the better.