Summary Of Light Bulb To Simulate Moonlight

Katie Paterson’s artwork titled “Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight” (Figure.1), 2008, is currently showing at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. It aims to imitate the moonlight through artificial means. The artwork seeks to connect the viewer with nature, which provides transportation to the place and confronts the cyclical relationship between humankind and nature. In Collaboration with an engineer from Osram , they measured the moon’s light spectrum and interpreted it to incandescent light bulbs as same as standardized ‘day light’ bulbs are created. Creating an ordinary object that changes completely when is turned on. The artwork contains a whole life’s moon light supply consisted of 289 bulbs, which if burned one after the other would glow for around 66 years, which is the average lifetime of a person. Encouraging the audience to think about our limited ability to sense and experience large natural cycles, our short time on earth and how small we are.
The rest of the light bulbs are aligned on shelves, waiting their turn as a cycle of mortality. The dead bulbs also make reference to the dying stars. In an interview with Waldemar Januszczak (1954) , Paterson claims that when a start dies the material that ejects it is what created the Earth and life. So from going to feeling this big disconnection between humanity and nature, to feeling that there is actually a deep interconnection between absolutely everything in the Universe. This relates to the theories about nature of Bruno Latour (1947), culturally we tend to think about nature as an independent from the human, but culture is part of nature, no opposed to it. Paterson in an interview at the MCA in Sydney said that “human beings we are not apart from nature, we are nature – it sounds obvious, but we are made of atoms like everything else. It’s easy to forget