Public, outdoor, digital and light art is a large and growing sector with a bright future, but works are hamstrung by having to be connected to power. This limits the locations they can be shown at, and often involves the use of complex infrastructures with inefficient and unsustainable power systems. This has created a real challenge for the Squidsoup team, considering our environmental impact when presenting our work in outdoor and rural locations.

In response to these challenges, the Power of Art project aims to find flexible and sustainable solutions for powering digital artworks, large and small, in any outdoor situation, and using our own works as guinea-pigs.

With R&D funding from SIRF (Stockton International Riverside Festival) and ACE (Arts Council England) we have partnered with Cleevely Electric Vehicles to explore the capability of second life electric car batteries in combination with solar energy to power digital artwork.

The first part of this R&D project involved measuring the power consumption of each of our artworks. Once we had a good understanding of this we could work out how much power is required to run our artwork off grid for a specific amount of time.

The next step was to test out these calculation with an artwork by setting it up onsite to see how it behaves across a couple of weeks. You can watch the live stream/recording of the live stream above.