Like America, 'Firefly' needs more windmills

Author: Robert McKay

Wind engineer Jito Coleman got his start during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Today Coleman is president of Northern Power Systems, a Waitsfield-based company that makes wind and hybrid power systems and specializes in getting green power to remote locations. Coleman is also an outdoor artist whose "Firefly", an installation of miniature windmills connected to light-emitting diodes (LEDs), went up in a couple of campus locations this weekend. The devices, fixed atop ski poles, were arranged on fields outside the Mahaney Center for the Arts and The Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest and are supposed to reveal the wind's patterns as the lights dim and brighten. "The land's interaction with the wind is the medium, and the lights allow this interaction to be visualized and appreciated," Coleman wrote in an e-mail.

The organizers noted that viewing "Firefly" is "wind dependent," but this weekend's lack of wind was not the only problem with the installation. Judging from video of other "Firefly" installations and from the arrangement of turbines on campus, even a strong wind wouldn't have revealed its patterns in the lights the way it does, say, in a field of tall grasses. Coleman cited such natural phenomena - "fields of wheat waving in the breeze, flags flying in the wind... waves lapping the beach" - as his inspiration. So far the project has not lived up to those models.

The passive attitude implied in Coleman's "the wind is the medium" might betray an underestimation of the need for rigorous artifice in eliciting art from nature. Considerably more effort would be needed to give Firefly the effortless grace of the windswept field in which it stands. The units would have to be installed much more densely, at regular intervals, across a much larger space. A hillside where viewers could look up at the installation might work well, as would a flat plain that could be viewed from a higher elevation. Both environments would allow the viewer to see more of the plain the LEDs define and to see the wind's movements across it. These movements would not be visible if the LEDs were all at eye level, as in this weekend's installation. A Midwestern plain with hundreds or thousands of units installed in a fairly dense grid would lend "Firefly" the kind of grandeur that defines outdoor sculptures like Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field," which may have been one of Coleman's influences.

Coleman's waving wheat and flying flags suggests that he may wish to align the project with a rallying of American patriotism around energy independence and the celebration of grand national landscapes. But in Coleman's statement, political overtones take a back seat to notions of interactivity and the ephemeral. None of this will come through with any strength until the "Firefly" project is scaled way up and installed in a more appropriate landscape. Coleman should follow the interactive minimalism of De Maria, who recruits his settings to become part of pieces whose man-made elements, like Coleman's points of light, are extremely simple. "Firefly" is an interesting idea with a long (and probably expensive) way to go.