Julius Schmiedel

  • Das Abenteuer der Mondlandung

    solar powered collages, 2021

    These one-offs are still available through the shop.

  • dancing tree

    The Palm Tree is triggered by a motion sensor, which lights up the LED powered tree as soon as someone moves in front of the piece. Continuous triggering (dancing, jumping, waving..) will soon start an animation: first in brightness of the tree, then the “disco mode” will engage. When interaction stops, or someone just passed by, the tree goes back to the dimmer state.
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  • the solar turntable

    For the Destination Moon Festival for solar-based Art and Music, a solar powered turntable had been built. While the sun provided energy to run the machine, records were played on the street in front of the festival. This lead to interaction not only with visitors to the festival, but people from the street which were passing by the artwork.

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    The work was mentioned in the wall street journal online here. update: behind paywall :(

     

  • Flamingo Flock

    As a continuation of my project of bringing radioactive ducks to europe, i started to build radioactive flamingos for new york.

    They containt electronics from a solar garden light, so they charge during the day, and start glowing their eyes at night. Here in the US, the flamingos are the equivalent to the projects with plastic ducks in germany, people put them in their yard, as there are no real animals to adore.

     

     
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  • Flux Star

    On the roof of Flux Factory, I installed a temporary light installation, called ‘Flux Star’. It is a solar powered reference to graffiti, where painting a star out of 4 or 8 simple lines was established to be put on walls trough out the city.

    Most parts come from a solar powered string light, which I bought and took apart to harvest LEDs and the main unit featuring a solar panel, a battery and the electronic parts to drive the LEDs. The circuit is quite similar to those used in the ducks, but more powerful.

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  • Radioactive Duck

    the radioactive duck

     

    The radioactive duck can be visited was at Aachener Weiher, Cologne. It is located across from japanese institute.

    During the day, a solar panel on the back of the duck charges a small battery inside the duck. With sunset, the eyes of the duck begin to glare in red color. The duck dropped anchor, so it will stay at its place unless some one takes it…

  • Protozoa Sphaerae Lucere

    “Protozoa Sphaerae Lucere”, my proposal for an art work in public space, came up second in a call by the french-german insurance company AXA. It is a LED driven light installation, consisting of thirty spheres floating on a pond. Each is equiped with environemental sensors to react to its surrounding, the whole system is solar powered by an external solar field.

    Many thanks to Peter Schuster and Martin Nawrath from KHM, which supported me through the planing!

    A PDF (in german) is available: Protozoa Sphaerae Lucere