Time of Publication: 11:18 - 14/3/22

The process of a sun burn arose from a humorous aspect, as a redhead the one thing that everyone tells you during the summer months is “Your nose is so red” “You got pretty burned today.” In response to this I thought it would be a fun project to actually display my UV intake as a sunburn in a location where I am not present in real-time.

My sunburn piece of work is one my first explorations into directly shifting natural processes into a smaller scale within contrived spaces. I am fascinated by digital but alongside this fascination I do not want to sacrifice the physical, hence why using just a screen doesn’t really make me feel comfortable, and having a hands on experience within the making is paramount.

The system behind the work is actually fairly simple but as one of my first explorations into micro controllers, sensors and code it took a while to make it work as I had envisioned.

I use a Ultra Violet sensor connected to a WiFi enabled micro controller. This can then be powered either by USB or a Li-Po battery. This small set up can be anywhere, with me in London or the other side of the world. When the Ultra Violet intake reaches a given threshold, it activates the work wherever it may be.

Within the gypsum cast frame, a raspberry Pi is monitoring an IO feed and when the feed signals a high level of Ultra Violet, the Skin like material will immediately change colour achieved by UV and reactive pigments within the piece itself. The red/pink will stay for a couple of minutes until eventually there is no trace. The process then will repeat itself at any moment.