I am pleased to announce that I have been commissioned to make a piece of art for Quay Arts, a contemporary art gallery on the Isle of Wight as part of the “Isle of Wight Hidden Heroes” project. The brief is to express Andy Stanford-Clarke’s status as being on the cutting edge of technology. One of Stanford-Clarke’s many contributions in his field is his real-time mapping of the ferries crossing the Solent. He is also a great advocate of the worldwide phenomenon, CheerLights so the piece will most probably incorporate both these elements.

CheerLights is an “Internet of Things” project created by Hans Scharler that allows people’s lights all across the world to synchronize to one colour set by Twitter. It is a way to connect physical things to a social networking experiences. For example, by sending the following tweet from a twitter account “@CheerLights, red” the tweet will cause a chain reaction and all of the lights across the world that have signed upto CheerLights will turn that colour. Until the next time some send a tweet to CheerLights requesting a different colour that is and then all the lights will change again.