Little Sun

The Little Sun project was initiated by artist Olafur Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen in 2012. Little Sun is a solar-powered LED lamp designed to provide light in a sustainable way to communities without electricity, and is also a project that aims to create local job opportunities and generate local profit. Every Little Sun that is sold in an area of the world that has access to electricity, enable the lamp to be sold at a locally affordable price in an off-grid African community. A lot of thought has been put into both aesthetic and sustainable concerns in the production of the lamp. The project can be seen as an extension of Eliasson's installation The Weather Project, where he constructed a giant, artificial sun at Tate Modern in London in 2003.

http://www.littlesun.com/index.php?sec=about

The lamp is designed to resemble a flower, and with its bright yellow colour and round shape, it also resembles a little sun. In addition to being a design-object, it is therefor also a representation, an image of a flower, or a sun. It can be seen both as a reconstruction of nature and a representation of nature. The lamp functions as a little sun when the actual sun has set, it stores sunlight and recreates it, and can both be seen as a cultural and a natural object. It resists nature – in the durability of its materials (plastic), but it also resists the natural cycle of the sun rising and setting.

The project considers both sustainability in relation to production and usage, and also social sustainability. It aims to sustain both the natural and the cultural. Does this affect how we perceive it, as a cultural/natural object?

What is the possible ideological and ontological effects of this re-creation of nature?

My paper will suggest that the Little Sun project can be seen as a way of reconstructing a natural phenomena for cultural benefits, and will argue that the project can have implications for the traditional natural/cultural and representational/original - dichotomies. I will argue that on an ontological level it can contribute to weaken these dualisms. Many of Eliassons installations concern a reconstruction of natural phenomena, and I will argue that the design-object of Little Sun, also falls into this category.