Shatter
A new commission for 2025, Shatter is a crystalline light work that bursts out of the ground. Something thrilling and unexpected, but perhaps not something entirely welcome.
In response to times that feel intrinsically troubling, Output Arts has created a light artwork that warns against technologies that promise quick fixes, while exposing the sharp threat of longer term consequences.
Shatter takes inspiration from the 1993 Sandia National Laboratories report on long-term nuclear waste warnings and the famous example wording they gave for such a warning:
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Shatter encompasses both the allure of the mysterious in its pulsing light and the potential danger in the jagged forms bursting from below the ground.