Electronic art is powered art.  Plugging into the grid is like growing a systemic appendage - a phantom limb - that makes the artist complicit in a host of activities never seen nor mentioned in work descriptions or catalogs.  What would electronic art veer toward if we explicitly freed it from this burden?  

For the Art Generator project, I construct a human-powered generator, and ask electronic artists to create pieces to consume the generated electricity.  These consumer pieces are created, added, removed and interconnected over the duration of the show, as an ecosystem of electron-using creative work and workers.  Power is only available, that is, the art is only generated, when an interested interlocutor puts their own energy into the pieces.

This piece was shown as part of Exit Art's Electric Lab show, September 2007. Participating artist (aside from the general public):

LoVid
Rich Miller
Ian Curry 
Greg Shakar
Paul Davies 

A video documenting the piece (Includes content from the Exit Art Podcast): 

A time-lapse video of the Exit Art install (Thanks for your help Corey!):