Among the pieces on display is "Chariot II-I Iike America and America likes me," a crashed car frame Jackson rescued from the front lawn of his cousin, racecar driver Skip Nichols. Jackson painstakingly restored and rebuilt the car as a material metaphor for transformation. One of the physical-metaphors in the work is that the car appears to float on a spectrum of fluorescent lights arranged in a circular red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet sequence.
This sequence of lights is not powered by the building's local power grid but by alternative energy -- and that's where MIT's Department of Facilities comes in. Several months ago, Walt Henry and Dick Amster of Facilities met with Jackson to discuss design options to power the lighting for Chariot II. Peter Cooper, Ron Adams, Eric Beaton, and Julia Ledewitz -- members of Henry's team in the Systems Engineering Group -- worked to develop a solar array installed on the roof that provides the power to illuminate Chariot II. The exhibition runs through July 12.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 13, 2009 (download PDF).
