Meet Your Energy Avatar

Meet Your Energy Avatar

collaboration with architect Rory Hyde

sculpture, 30 x 8 m

electroluminescent cable

We once had a very direct relationship to our energy use, as with most animals today, it was directly related to our metabolic rate. Asleep we require about 90 watts of energy to ‘run’, to subsist in the Amazon as a hunter gatherer requires about 250 watts. With the rise of civilization and technology, the modern middle class human in the developed world requires around 11,000 watts to live, which, as physicist Geoffrey West calculates “is more watts than a blue whale … the biggest animal that has ever existed.” In the world where living and technological systems co-evolve, we might need to see ourselves for who we really are. Meet Your Energy Avatar converts what is distributed energy networks of our lives into single ecological entities – large animals.