Money Conducts Electricity!!!

Place a coin or as many coins as you can from your pocket onto a table to create an electrical circuit; to make a connection.

The user places a coin onto the nylon plastic table, joining two of the slightly raised metal slugs thus creating an electronic circuit.  The connection is detected instantly by a computer that then flashes an image (2-3 frames) onto the underside of the table, viewable on top; at the same time generating a ‘snappy’, ‘lightening like’ sound in sync with the image.  This repeats slowly at random intervals (3-5sec) until the coin is taken off.  The more coins on the table the quicker and more frequent it flashes. Please see attached illustrations.

The aim is to create a work that emphasises interaction and encourages the user to consider and participate in a fiscal narrative with social consequences. This work is more than a live video installation, a virtual experience, a technological puzzle or illusion; it focuses instead on actual user interaction and the experience of a result; and then the taking of that experience with them into the streets.  What happens when they next meet a beggar on the street?

The work was born from the phrase ‘Money Conducts Electricity’. The images represent randomly all things that money influences – oil industries, homeless people, political figures, mass production, education, the third world, war, music, environment, consumer choices etc.