Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
KEVIN KELLEY: You'd have to see the thing and think, well,
what is that?
That's the initial impression, what is that?
And then it's like, why does it have solar panels on it?
And then it's, oh, there are cell phone
charging cables on it.
This must charge my cell phone.
So then you go over there and discover that.
And I think it's a little bit of a pleasure to have an
experience of discovery.
Well, my name is Kevin Kelly.
I'm a sculptor.
And recently I became interested in solar energy
technology.
It's my current desire to integrate this solar
technology into my sculpture.
Solar power is what we need to think about, I think.
I mean, it's clean.
It's free.
It's expensive, but ultimately, it's coming from a
free source.
But we just have to figure out a way to make it cheaper and
more accessible.
And this piece is kind of about that.
I started doing sculpture about 15 years ago, and it's
slowly evolved from a figurative Brancusi kind of
style to these very geometric pieces.
So this is a sculpture and cellphone charger.
And it's obviously inside.
But you walk up and click on there, and
boing, you get juice.
I'm going to cover the whole thing with solar panels,
basically, as much as possible, to trick
it out a bit more.
It's basically waterproof, but some things
are a little sensitive.
And nobody would be wanting to plug it in, in the rain,
obviously, anyway.
So it's kind of a fair weather kind of device.
The process of assembly looks something
like this, right here.
It's not going to be quite so easy to get back together.
But you can see a bit of the structure of the piece this
way, which I think is kind of interesting.
There it goes.
I sort of didn't want that to happen.
That's how it's structured inside.
A battery that goes down in there and a bunch of charge
controllers and little gizmos that go in there.
I had cigarette chargers from cars, five of them, and I plug
all the USB cables into those.
They have adapters to do that.
So that's really how it works.
Piazza Navona in Rome is the most amazing public space,
because of this fantastic public sculpture.
So for five centuries, people have been going there to have
their coffee, because it's just
amazing, amazing sculpture.
That's my goal, really, is to create something with that
kind of impact.
-If you love home and design and want to see the new
cooler, hipper channel--
-Check out SPACEStv, and don't forget to subscribe.
-Click the button, right here.