There's an inherent attraction to light and being human,
and I think on a very deep psychological level,
light is this way in which we experience
the energy surrounding us in a very personal manner.
My name is Matt Dilling.
I'm the the founder of Lite Brite Neon studio,
and we manufacture, produce, and restore
neon works of art and design.
(neon sizzling)
Origins of the creative content
of a lot of the work at Lite Brite
comes from a variety of sources.
Sometimes people come with a napkin sketch.
Some people come with an Adobe Illustrator file.
And we have a whole design team,
who then we kind of work together
to help create layouts of what it might look like.
Scale it up and create a paper template using a pen plotter.
And that paper template actually becomes our guide
for what we're going to bend the neon to.
We take from the office into the glass shop.
We pick out the right size tubing,
with the right color, for the right size project.
(switches clicking)
(lighter flicking)
From there, we heat up the glass tubing.
(flame whooshing)
The torches heat the glass well in excess of 1,000 degrees
in order for it to get into its molten state.
We heat up and bend the glass tubing to match the template.
One of our chandeliers has over 100 different bends in it,
so each one of those bends has to be marked
for a heated-up bend.
We also have to allow the glass to cool between the bends
so that the next area can be worked on and heated up
in its own unique fashion.
It turns into spaghetti,
and then we have to make sure that that spaghetti
lines back up and cools to the template.
We use a blow hose to connect our mouth to the tube
to create a volume that's closed,
and we can control the pressure in there with our mouth.
There's just a variety of challenges that come up
inherently in working with glass.
Glass can crack due to stress,
and sometimes you'll just have a batch
that all it wants to do when it gets near a torch is crack.
After we've bent various components,
we have to go in using the cross-fire or the hand torch,
and actually weld all of those pieces together.
The last step on that is then
to weld on electrodes onto either end.
Each one of those steps is very, very specific.
I draw inspiration from so many different experiences.
It's hard to come up with one thing that's particular,
but one of the ways that I really am able
to connect with the creative is to float.
Floating is a similar experience to meditation,
to psychedelics.
Going into a blackened room
and laying out in a body of water and salt
that's heated to your body temperature,
and it allows
for all sort of external stimulation to fall away,
and your internal world really begins to bubble up
and manifest.
You really get to experience
a different relationship to your mind.
(flames whooshing)
I think I work with neon because I can't not work with it.
It's so challenging and so rewarding,
and those things are so intertwined
that there's no way of separating it out.
I have learned so much,
and continue to learn so much by working with it.
I find so much inspiration in working with it,
and I just continue to experience new and different things
through the medium.
It's that close to me at this point.
Once the neon tube is completed,
we have to hook it up to our manifold for bombarding.
The manifold is opened,
a vacuum is drawn,
we check the tube for leaks with our Tesla coil,
we close the tube back off,
and we heat it up
using a very large and powerful transformer.
As the tube is heated up,
it releases anything that's not inert inside the tube,
and we evacuate that out.
We introduce the gas into it,
and we seal the tube off,
sealing into that tube whatever gas we introduced into it.
I think my favorite part of making a neon light
is when I see it lit up for the first time.
Different gases, when electrified,
emit different wavelengths of light.
Neon gas is this very bright orange, fiery red color.
Argon gas creates a very intense blue,
but that light output that is produced
can then be expressed in a different wavelength
by coating the inside of the tubes with a phosphor coating
that takes that one wavelength of light
and emits a different wavelength.
We bring it over to the aging table,
where we hook it up to an aging transformer
and allow it to settle,
age the gas in that we've introduced to it.
There's always a stray particle of something
left inside the tube,
but that time that the oxide coating
can act to scrub whatever is left inside the tube
while things are getting settled into place.
(neon buzzing)
Once the tubes are aged in,
we move on to our process of assembling
two halves of the fixture together in a jig,
gluing up the center of the fixture to its spindle.
Once the adhesive dried,
we would connect the wires from the fixture together
into a transformer,
and we turn on power, and it lights up.
Part of what we love about what we do here
is that we try and put out into the world
the kind of things that we'd like to see.
I still am surprised when it lights up.
I'm still excited when I get to see it illuminated.
There's an ineffable quality to it.
To me, it's this insight
into the inner workings of the universe.
It literally is.
It's a way of looking at what is surrounding us
in the cosmos in a new light.
(tinkling)