I was thinking of Yoko Ono’s “Box of Smile” as the inspiration behind this piece.  In that piece, the viewer would approach a closed box that simply said a box of smile and upon opening the box, it would reveal a mirror in which the viewer would “get it” and start smiling, fulfilling the work’s name.  For my own love-o-meter, the concept aimed to accomplish two ideas: (1) love is special and frankly, who is more special than yourself (didn’t your mother tell you that)?; and (2) in order to love freely, you must first learn to love yourself.  To demonstrate this, I placed a mirror inside a box with a photocell sensor that would detect how far a person’s face was from the mirror.  I than set up a set of conditions that would give a range for how far a person’s face was from the mirror, in which the red LED would light up when the person’s face was literally pressed up against the mirror in embrace.

I at first tried the love-me-meter with a passive infrared motion sensor but was limited in the fact that it was only a digital output, telling me whether or not something was moving.  Not willing to spend the money on a more analog-type of proximity sensor, I decided to use the light sensor as an indicator of how close an object was to something (would block more light).  The results are below.