"The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium precisely because it has no 'content'."
Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media.

The physical communications networks have invaded our homes. Beneath our walls and floors pulse information and power. The twisted pair telephone line has become our ears and mouth for socializing. Mains power cables bring us the basic resources of heat and light. Radio and Optical Fiber networks have become an everyday part of our lives, providing culture and knowledge at the touch of a button.

Our bodies soon learn new reflexes to use these systems that have been incorporated into our homes. Light switches are clicked without a thought for the consequences as people enter and leave. There is an essence of trust that the lightswitch is connected to the nearby lightbulb, and we have taken it as natural that the flick of a wall switch can change a light many meters away.

"Hyperlight" is a collection of projects that start by refusing to take the mechanisms of the lightbulb and the lightswitch for granted. The projects exist in many guises and cross boundaries between physical gallery space and space created by electronic wiring and internet sites.

Many of the Hyperlight projects are currently off-line and only exist as documentation or as demonstrative pieces. The projects were all exhibited on the 24th of June 1998, for three weeks as part of the 'unattended articles' exhibition at Oxford brookes University.

The HyperRoom is constructed so that a physical space is overlaid with a projected virtual space. Users are caught between these spaces as they move around the room and interact with the switches which do not work as first expected.

In the HyperDesk all we see is our peripheral vision, it's just repeated many times in the monitor screen. Users can see the small red in the screen, and in the screen in the screen.

Controlling a lightbulb via the internet through a graphical representation of a lightswitch on anyone's monitor screen.

The technology of moving one bit of information from England to Holland and back again isn't likely to replace the telephone, but it does have it's uses for saying "hello".