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C hristopher Schardt is an LED artist from Oakland, California, best known for his large, immersive works such as Mariposa , Paraluna and Firmament . His pieces have appeared at Burning Man, Love Burn, Electric Daisy Carnival, the Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California and the 2020 World’s Fair in Dubai. Schardt works on his own art pieces as well as commissions.
this incredible canvas and there are tens of thousands of people who will come along and see your art. I made a very primitive LED piece in 2000, an art car in 2002 and an electroluminescent wire piece in 2003. I took some years off to build a workshop in Oakland, then got back to doing pieces in 2010. I was doing fire art – propane-driven, kinetic art that spins around, propelled by the thrust of propane fuel. All through this I’m doing all the programming for each art piece. In 2013, I decided it was too much work to continue doing fire art because you have to follow all kinds of safety protocols and have lots of staff. If there’s one thing that gets tiresome at Burning Man, it’s art that has to be staffed. It’s so much nicer if you can just put the art out there and let it run itself. So I took another year off. Then in 2015, I made a large piece called Firmament , a 52ft-diameter canopy of 21,600 LED modules. That changed everything because it was far and away my most successful piece. It ran itself all night, it didn’t have to be staffed and it made these patterns choreographed to classical music. I had stumbled across an absolutely fabulous formula, which was to provide light art with a narrative. That narrative changes everything. There’s plenty of light art; there’s always been light art at Burning Man. But people look at it and
Interview Katie Kasperson
What initially inspired you to create LED installations? I got a degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1985 – a long time ago – and I was, and still am, a happy computer programmer. I love doing it. I was also a professional musician; I had a band and thought I was going to be a big recording artist in the nineties. That ended at the turn of the century when I realised that wasn’t
going to happen. Mostly because the music industry is not about how you sound, it’s about how you look. And I was a middle-aged white guy, right? In 1998, I started going to Burning Man and, boom, a whole new world opened for me. Not because I love the desert per se, but because I love a venue that gives you permission to pursue your craziest artistic ideas. That’s exactly what Burning Man is, from an artist’s point of view. It’s
Schardt’s first large-scale LED piece Firmament put him on the map
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