DESCRIPTION
The artist team of Christina Ulke and Ashok Sukumaran designed an installation featuring a redesigned parking ticket booth with an interactive lighting element. The booth becomes a reference to an obsolete kind of security apparata. In The Savant Guard, the act of surveillance is removed from the booth, making it the subject of both the human and machine gaze. A sun-reflector has been placed on the edge of the site to reflect natural light onto the ticket booth. This mirror-based tracking system follows the sun through the day, reflecting a constant beam of light onto the south face of the booth. The colors employed for the lighting are used to respond to the viewer in a public situation. As pedestrians pass or interrupt the reflected sunbeam from the sun-tracker, their speed determines the color of the booth making a personal action quite public. The color change is computer programmed to react to different speeds to provide a change of color.