- [Narrator] "Making" is presented by the Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York.

(dramatic music continues) (intense music begins) - [Jimmy] There's so many different things about light.

I mean, there's this phenomenological aspect in which it's like a fire that everybody can kind of get around.

So there's something that we are just wired, like music, we are wired to be compelled by.

I'm Jimmy Ronner.

I am a transdisciplinary artist.

I'm a glass maker by profession, and I have been working with Neon for the last, almost 10 years.

I got interested in Neon when I was doing my graduate work at Alfred University.

I was doing a lot of research into phenomenological work, like work that basically operates more on the subconscious.

Like you create experiences for people that they can in some ways dislocate from their reality, right?

And I think that there's like an ethical proposition within phenomenological work that I found most compelling, and I wound up getting more excited about like phenomenological work.

But the ethical proposition is essentially it asks you to fundamentally reevaluate how you perceive things.

And light is this material that can affect spaces and viewers in a way with very low infrastructure.

Neon's got tons of complexity.

The inner nerd in me just was like always looking for like new material explorations and light as itself, and then also the technical aspects of neon were really fascinating, and have really kept me really charged over the last like 10 years or so.

Also, I just really like neon, and I think it has this beautiful light, and the shadows that it casts are both subtle and it's powerful all at the same time.

Neon is essentially when you take a glass vessel, and you have to clean it in some way.

So things can absorb into the surface of the glass.

So you're not just cleaning the surface, you can clean it with heat, heat it up, and then everything kind of gets burned.

And then what we do is we connect it to a vacuum and we suck out all of like the things that have kind of burned out, the debris from the cleaning process, and then we replace it with a noble gas.

And the noble gases, they live over on the right hand side of the periodic table.

Some of those are helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon.

These are all beautiful noble gases.

And they're noble because they don't react with anything.

They're essentially like inert.

They can just kind of like go into an environment and it is really hard to get them to like break down and recombine with other things.

So what we do in this really clean glass vessel, we put in a noble gas, or a mixture of that.

Sometimes we'll add a little bit of mercury to it, and we splice on these electrodes that allow us to pass a lot of electricity through it.

And the electricity going through this noble gas atmosphere creates a plasma, and that plasma creates a discharge of light.

So it creates light and it creates some heat, not too much.

And that light is filtered by the tube, or the vessel that we've put that gas into.

If you have a clear tube and you put neon into it, that noble gas, you'll get that iconic red orange.

If you put like argon into it, you get a kind of like a purple-ish, a really light faint purple.

You add a little bit of mercury to it, you get a nice kind of baby blue.

So the gases do create some of the color, but we can also have different colored tubes.

And most of the color though is coming from what's known as a phosphor coating.

So it's a white powder that's put onto the surface of the inside of the tube.

So what you're doing inside of that tube is you're recreating these like cosmological environments that cause the phosphor coating to fluoresce and glow.

So the majority of the color is actually coming from the phosphor coating.

And you get into like really complicated, kind of like combinations of all of this, and you can get, it's an infinite rainbow of effects and colors that you can achieve.

(gentle music continues) You know, art to me has always been like a vehicle for interacting with the world.

I think in some ways, like, I mean, I'm internally like an optimistic person, but like I think it keeps me optimistic because it allows me to leverage this natural curiosity instead of kind of shutting it down.

It allows me to be able to explore and really activate other people's spaces.

For a long time since I was like a kid, I wanted to take less than I was able to give.

But balancing that with like the inherent narcissism and delusional nature of being an artist is difficult.

You have to believe in these grandiose ideas and the merit of your idea.

And it is, in the end of the day, it is a spectacle.

The glass itself is light, but there's this visual gravity, the bright, the shiny, the heavy that can like innately prime people, our community, to gravitate towards it and then question why it is there.

My wife, Clair Elizabeth Cadorette, who is an amazing artist in her own right, her and I are starting a company called Electric Cuties.

We're just kind of like in the product development phase of it.

It's a company that like is definitely gonna be part of the process for us to be able to make our own personal work.

But most importantly, honestly, is that it's cost effective.

We wanna be able to bring light to our neighborhoods.

I think there's a lot of ways that you could charge a lot more money for what we do, but you kind of price yourself outta markets, and creating like a neon business in a place where there hasn't been neon for decades and decades, and Meyer's not alone, right?

I mean, like, you have to go to like major cities, really, to find neon shops.

Like this, the narrative that exists within the object, I think that it's so much part of like who we are and what we do, because like we are blessed with like this enlarged telencephalon, the multi-variable larynx that can take a breath and break it into multiple sounds, and these opposable thumbs that can make concrete these very abstract ideas.

Like we are fundamentally creative creatures that make things.

It's the usage of like neon in its history as signage to address some of the impacts of consumerism in a subversive manner.

That is really, really important to me, because the world is filled with objects, and most of those objects tell a story that I don't think, if people really thought about the story, really want that story to be the dominant narrative.

And I wanna make objects, and experiences, and time for people that has value, and that is part of the narrative that we do want to create for the future.

(dramatic music continues) - [Narrator] "Making" is made possible with support from the Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York, from Beer Properties, and from viewers like you.