Solar Powered Tesla rolls off production line in Canberra Workshop

The Tesla electric vehicle has captured the minds and wallets of many. Named after one of the major protagonists in the electric power tug or war - Tesla Vs Edison, the modern Tesla car and energy storage systems are - in some paradoxical ( and I'm sure unintended ways) making Tesla spin in his grave - we can only hope it is synced to 50 Hz.  The modern Tesla systems ( cars/motors, batteries and PV capture) , certainly interface with the now pervasive AC world, but are essentially part of a DC ecosystem. It does seem to be a cruel irony, the bind the name of a great advocate for AC - Nikola Tesla - with such a strong DC brand. 

So, when it can time for me to do some development work as part of my creative fellowship, with the Wonderment Walk Victoria project, I needed a portrait to fuel the process. What better test subject, than Nikola. Under the fellowship, I am exploring applications of ancient - but not widely understood - pin hole optics, the deeper phenomena of shadows, and human perception - to devise a way to create images using sunlight, direct and un-processed.

Ultimately, the technique may find applications in various public spaces, where on a sunny day, an installation may simultaneously shield a pedestrian from our largest/nearest  thermo-nuclear engine, but also deliver a portrait, to capture some passing interest, and acknowledge some notable.

Using a range of software systems, and custom coding, I was able to process a portrait of Nikola, and generate the CNC code for the router. The translation of brightness to hole size and position was initially based on intuition. But it proved .... well ..you can see..

Even a small section of the original image, translated to the scaled hole size, produced results that were .. far better than expected.

On the sunny summer day of the test, just a few holes held up to the sun generated  a passable image, even on the dusty floor of the workshop. Such apparent detail from so few points, speaks volumes for the ability of the human perceptual system.. to ...........fake it.

Ultimately, the testing of the full portrait was a great and encouraging success. It seems to provides a technique that is efficient to generate and fabricate, is not overly sensitive to the angle of the sun, and is most importantly -- slightly mystifying and fascinating. More work is needed, and designs for the actual public installations will take some time. But. again I am in Nikola's debt. The router used for the production of this Shadowgraph, uses AC .. and a lot of of it.