Bruce Munro does amazing things with lights.  Consider this, his current exhibition at the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK covers an area of 60 x 20 meters, and has 6,000 acrylic stems through which 24,000 meters of fibre optic cables run.  Only eleven external projectors provide the light as the stems themselves hold no electric power at all.

The exhibit runs through Spring of 2009.  I found this over at inhabitat but an cathach has a nice writeup too.

I makes me wonder if all our Christmas lighting could perhaps be a bit more interesting and green with some thought towards commercial products that are based on fibre optic cabling?   All of this with eleven projectors?  Think what you could do with one projector (which surely takes less power than all those strings of lights) in your front garden.

Bruce has other beautiful works at his own website.