Nabokov’s Nightlight
The idea started out as a potential variant of Throwies, that beloved low-tech hi-lumens Graffiti Research Lab invention: http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=6#video
A Throwie is assembled from a magnet, an LED, a watch battery and some duct tape. The results stick harmlessly to metal and glow. You can use them to be a stupid hippie and get arrested in China like this guy:
I have been rather enamored of Throwies for a number of years now, but have yet to use them to decorate Portland’s cast-iron buildings…
…another project that will probably happen someday.
I digress. I was thinking about refrigerator magnet letters and whether they could be hacked to be Throwies, or otherwise wired to glow:
It seems like the could be, if you got the right ones (big, thinnish plastic) and some really bitty LEDs to go in them. However! Colored letters made me think of color/letter synesthesia, a phenomenon popularized by Vladimir Nabokov but apparently common to a lot of folks who are not literary geniuses but just see letters as colors, like so:
I like to think that I’m slightly synesthetic from music to colors, but it’s probably just my ‘magination/love of Philip Glass. Anyhow, synesthesia is nifty. I think it might be cool to try and replicate Nabokov’s alphabet in glowy magnetic letters, but I don’t know where I’d get the right colors for all the letters.
I mean, who makes grey refrigerator magnets? I’d probably have to cast them myself out of resin and shove the LEDs and magnets in them as I go along, which might be either really fun or a huge pain in the ass, and probably both. Would sort of defeat the whole ‘hack the boring toy’ conceit, too. Well, rats.
