Synchronised Parking Indicators:

LINKS to temporary Synchronised Parking Website & Gallery	permanent light sculpture: “Synchronised Parking Indicators” by Seán Hillen & Katharine Lamb a Percent for Public Art commission for Dublin City Council in the Courtyard of Boyne St. Flats in central Dublin (see maps)	Contact the artists here to seanhillen.com to katharinelamb.com See the SITE MAPS to visit. Lit from 2pm to 2am, best viewed around dusk

28 self-contained custom-built outdoor wall lights, one per parking bay
each regularly changes colour, in playful reference to car colours
red, green and blue LEDs make thousands of potential colours by optical mixing
colours randomly selected by built-in microcontroller
slow continuous ripple change to new colours
result is row(s) of ever-different patterns of coloured lights
makes beautiful display and draws attention to ideas of synchronicity and chance
refers directly to ‘love affair with car’
bright enough to be visible in daylight and night but do not replace normal lighting
the work is accompanied by a 'synchronised parking' gallery website
installed in July 2004

supported by: LUMILED Ltd., Ryotek Ltd. and Bob Bushell Ltd.

Commissioned by Michael Foley of Elliott Maguire Landers
on behalf of Dublin City Council's
Boyne St. Refurbishment Project

Internal electronics custom-manufactured by Andrew O'Riordan of Ryotek Ltd.

Ultra-high intensity LEDs by LUMILED supplied by Future Electronics

Light fitting casings by Artemide supplied by Bob Bushell

Stonework by Bobby Blount - Electrical Installation by Tom Mooney

Above: early photoshop impression of the work

Below and Top: Photos of the finished work

Synchronised Parking: The Concept:

An art project with elements of spoof (or real?) science, comedy and a little mystery.

Based on the idea that cars get seem to parked in sometimes interesting and apparently non-random patterns, and a theory that connects it to the phenomenon of synchronicity.

These lights offer an expression of the proposed phenomenon and even playfully suggest patterns for parking.

Refers to the ‘Seriality’ theories of Paul Kammerer, and Carl Jung’s ideas about ‘Synchronicity’, popularised by Arthur Koestler’s 1971 book “The Roots of Coincidence”

Seán formed an idea for artwork based on his theory that cars get parked in detectible patterns and rhythms:

It seemed to be demonstrable by documenting the phenomenon and over a couple of years he has photographed many such patterns. For instance:

1. Identical cars 'get' parked together; the same colour and model nose-to-nose or across the road from each other.

2. Certain colours (red, black, white) appear in long groups and in various patterns and almost musical rhythms; e.g. red, white, black, white, red.

3. A whole street of red or red and white cars sometimes happens.

4. After a while Sean noticed yellow and white cars often paired, then that there was also or instead often a green car nearby.

This may be ‘the music of what happens’ or may be just that we are such sheep and do this kind of thing unconsciously.

Seán and Katharine developed and executed this sculpture as another embodiment of the concept:

The idea is that the lamps indicate where cars might park. It remains to be seen if the mathematically-generated random number tables that the controllers use will show interesting patterns.

Subsequent versions of this work (we would like to extend them across Dublin and possibly other cities) may choose randomly from colours that have been already selected and programmed by the artists to correlate to actual car colours or recorded parking patterns.

Another embodiment of the lights might sense the colour of actual parked cars using a built-in video camera and indicate that colour instead, recording and amplifying rather than suggesting the pattern.

some of the local kids

Above: The first handmade prototype opened showing the arrays of the red, green & blue LED's. all design work © Sean Hillen & Katharine Lamb, and Ryotek Ltd 2004	The first prototype from RYOTEK. Right: The final layout of the PCBs.		close-up of a lamp
Seán appeared on RTE's 'Open House' TV programme on 15th March to talk about his work for the St' Patrick's Day symposium and showed a protoype lamp and discussed the project .		Below: stonemason Bobby Blount at work.
		Below: stonemason Bobby Blount at work.

More on Synchronicity & Seriality:

Most people have experienced so-called ‘synchronistic’ events; unusual coincidences which have no sensible cause but have for them apparent significance of some kind.

‘Serial’ events on the other hand tend to have little special significance in themselves but seem to demonstrate paradoxical order in apparent randomness.

It may be that the patterns are there to be seen or that humans have such an urge to impose pattern and order that we see it anyway.

Paul Kammerer (see below) was a biologist who became interested in ‘synchronous’ events and applied the statistical analysis he’d learned from behaviouristic biology.

In one early experiment, sitting on a park bench he recorded the colours worn by people passing. Analysing the data gleaned showed clusters and patterns of, in this instance, unusual colours.

This phenomenon is said to be known by insurance actuaries, who work out the probabilities for insurance companies, and by gamblers who believe that ‘luck’ comes in ‘runs’ and that probability theory is an incomplete description of events.

Paul Kammerer and his “Law of Seriality”:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer advanced his little-known but thought-provoking theory of "seriality."

Kammerer supposed that events, objects, or occurrences of a like kind assemble together in space and time through unknown and acausal means.

Kammerer defined seriality as:
"a lawful recurrence, or clustering, in time and space whereby individual members of the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active source."

Where Jung's synchronicity deals with the relationship between subjectivity and the external world, Kammerer's seriality is more concerned with patterns and groupings of objects that occur in the environment.

Many of us have had the experience whereby we encounter a new word for the first time and, surprisingly, we encounter it numerous times after its initial introduction into our lives. For instance, someone rolls off a particularly mellifluous sounding word in conversation, "insouciant," that piques your curiosity but you have no idea of its meaning. Shortly after hearing it the first time, you read it in a book, someone else uses it in conversation-and someone else. This clustering of the word "insouciant" is an example of Kammerer's notion of seriality, and for Kammerer, much to his critic's disagreement, this patterning was not random but meaningful.

Link to another page on seriality and synchronicity