There's a reason lamps were the first electrical gadgets: they're simple. A simple switch opens or closes the connection between an electric current and a light bulb. The filament in the light bulb heats up from the electricity, and voila. Let there be light.
Like I said, simple. Elegant. But it's a simplicity and elegance that is hidden away inside a lamp, where you can't really appreciate it. As part of their Node series of lamps, The Odd Matter Design Studio has taken the elegance of a lamp's mechanism and externalized it as a sculptural part of the body itself.
Made out of copper and jesmonite (gypsum suspending in acrylic, like a sort of sculptable drywall) the Node series of lamps transform their shapes by opening and closing, like barettes or safety pins. When they do so, they physically close the electrical circuit, which in turn lights up their LED bulbs.
About the Node series, Odd Matter writes:
A lamp has a particularly interesting transformation as it changes to deliver something which is not initially there. It exists to deliver light but light does not take part of the physicality of the object. This suggest that a lamp is a sculptural object when light isn't present and its function begins with its transformation towards delivering light. A lamp therefor is a medium between us and light and the act of turning it on and off is essential as well as symbolic in relation to the object... Node aims at being a very direct and simple way of describing this.
There's five different versions of the Node Lamp, all of which look in part like elegant, quasi-scientific lab objects. There's a feeling about them almost that they could be used in a science museum to teach curious children about how lamps work... or, at least, how lamps worked before dimmers.
[via Design Milk]