As the rapid development of urbanization, the sky has been washed out by excess urban lighting that instead of seeing thousands and thousands of stars, we may be seeing only hundreds, or sadly, maybe only dozens. Because of the lack of city development and dark sky protection, light pollution is nibbling up the stunning bright sky. When was the last time we looked at the sparking stars twinkle in the sky? Sometimes we need to get away from the city nights to seek the beauty we have lost.

In this artwork, we want to help people experience the charm of the starry night and make people pay attention to light pollution as well as the pollution haven’t been put enough on sequentially. In attempt to create something that can deliver the audience with unique experience, the installation of Starlight, aims to create an artificial starry night above the city.

Our inspiration is from the artwork called Fireflies on the Water by Kusama Yayoi. Kusuma is a Japanese artist who is famous for her painting, sculpture, performance art and environment installation. In her artwork Fireflies on the Water, she installed thousands of lights in a room that fully covered with mirrors. The audiences can enter the artwork and feel the visually infinite space Kusama created.

The artwork is to be experienced in a large room (room 3330, surrey campus) where our installation is located in the corner of the room. We use the whole room to present our artwork so that the audience can physically enter the artwork, exploring the environment. The “buildings” in the city are represented by 10 different structures created using the white foams as support and sheer papers. Inside each of these buildings there is a LED strip which is connected to the breadboard with an ultrasonic distance sensor on it. These “buildings” are placed in the corner of the room represent the “city”, while the rest of the room represents the “urban area”. Three laptops are required for our art work, two laptops are respectively connected to two projectors, projecting the starry sky image at the ceiling above the installations, which simulate the sky of the city; and the other one is connected to the Arduino board and breadboard, running the program. The intended audiences for Starlight are people from any age group who have interest and curiosity to explore. One audience at each time will be instructed to walk further into the city, once the audience enters the sensor range, the sensor put on the wall behind the buildings will be triggered, starting to detect the distance to the audience. The building lights will be brighter as the audience walks further into the city (closer to the sensor), and they get dimmer as the audience walks away from the city. Our work is interactive not only because the audience can walk around to control the building lights, but also the audience outside of the “city” can observe the change of our artwork.