The Daily Lamp: Mike Thompson’s BLOOD LAMP – Would You BLEED for Light?

Today’s Daily Lamp is a bit off-norm, if you will — artist Mike Thompson has posed a simple question:

Will you bleed for illumination?  

Blood Lamp from miket on Vimeo.

From Mike Thompson’s page on the Blood Lamp:

What if power came at a cost to the individual?

The average American consumes 3383kwh of energy per year. That’s equivalent to leaving the light on in 4 rooms for a whole year. The simple flick of a switch allows us to power appliances and gadgets 24/7 without a thought to where it comes from and the cost to the environment.

For the lamp to work one breaks the top off, dissolves the powder, and uses their own blood to power a simple light. By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.

Mike raises a great point — one my parents instilled in me at an early age — shut the lights off when you’re not in a room!

Mike’s lamp is a fairly simple design, but definitely ingenius.  The design is basically a sealed glass envelope that includes an amount of Luminol powder that, when dissolved and mixed with human blood, creates a bioluminescent light source.  Now is it bright enough to provide any real usable illumination?  Probably not.  But regardless, this isn’t Mike’s point.  The point is to help you make better choices as to when you really need light.

Step one, the unbroken envelope:

Step two, remove the stopper with the Luminol powder:

Step three, bust the top off of the envelope so that there are lots of nice little jaggeties for you to bleed from:

Step four, cut yourself on the glass envelope and bleed into the Luminol:

Game, set, match.  The Blood Lamp.