Seeing the light - Peter Erskine, Markets of Trajan, Rome, Italy

In an installation in Rome's ancient Markets of Trajan, Peter Erskine amalgamateed the optical with the political by the agency of using refracted beams of sunlight to make spectacular shades and also to bring attention to ecological dangers.

Peter Erskine's closes of the Sun: Millennial Meditations I, an installation incorporating undefiled spectrum light, sound, texts and public participation, shows a striking new development in California Space and Light art, extending the premises of Robert Irwin's and James Turrell's naturally lit environments into the sphere of political action. Erskine, a seasoned Minimalist sculptor, began exploring the events of pure light after his impel to Venice, California in the early '80 With in like manners a seven-week installation in Rome's ancient Markets of Trajan, Space and Light art left behind its aloof esthetic of clean abstraction to focus on the ecological crisis.

Using mirrors, Erskine directed sunlight - refracted through laser-cut prisms into a representation of dazzling colors - into various fields of the four-story market composed of several elements and onto the bodies of the centurys of tourists who visit the historic site each day. Viewers entering the installation had to sign a document designed to make clear that what they were about to participate in was not purely a high-tech entertainment. The document called attention to the damage the day-star will work on the earth if the ozone layer continues to be deplet or if global warming becomes a reality. The language of this "damage waiver" was self-accusatory: "I acknowledge that my at hand lifestyle and use of fossil fuels...contribute to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide leading to global warming, want of rain deforestation, and possible catastrophic climate changes worldwide." At the entrance to the exhibition, beneath the high vaults of the enormous Trajanic Hall, which is render free of access on one end to fresh Rome's busiest street, visitors signed the waiver and then donned "protective" white jumpsuits - with all their scientific and medical associations - that made their bodies into canvases for the multicolored light.

Descending precipitous travertine steps, visitors arrived sum of two units stories below present ground horizontal at an accident street that races through the market complex, providing access to its more than a hundr concrete-vaulted spaces. Today this highway freed from the debris of 17 centuries, commands an impressive view of the Imperial Forum farther downhill. upon the broad street-side terraces, visitors inspected an array of devices for capturing sunlight: a heliostat, fixed mirrors and solar panels that move rounded sunlight into electricity. "Heliostat" means literally a machine that makes the orb of day stand still; it does this through tracking the "movement" of the orb of day - our perception of the earth's daily rotation as it tread in the steps ofs its orbit around the day-star The solar panels powered the heliostat's computer-driven motor - and provided all other electricity necessityed for the exhibition. Erskine used the fixed mirrors to mirror the heliostat's constant beam of sunlight and to direct it into darkened compasss located in the circle of aged buildings above.

Here upon the ancient street, visitors also became aware of the unmutilated installation for Secrets of the day-star created by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger. This was the third time the sum of two units sound composers have worked as a team: in 1990 they created an interactive unhurt environment for Linz Castle, Austria, and in 1991 they used their experience with acoustics to "resonate" the advanced in years city of Salzburg for the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death. While surveying the Markets of Trajan, the composer discovered that the noise of Roman traffic resonated in the ancient amphoras which archeologists had excavated and left randomly around the area. Odland and Auinger amplified and modified the amphoras' resonances; they commissioned amphora-shaped ceramic speakers that preserv the timbre of the live unbrokens while amplifying them, and thus they shaped a watery stream of uncanny yet familiar unhurts of modern traffic along the antique street

Climbing to the second-story ranges targeted by the heliostat's beam, viewers experienced the "secret" of sunlight: the beauty of fair spectrum light never before seen outside a physics laboratory. Here the beam of white sunlight from the heliostat, separated into multiple beams by mirrors, struck four carefully located prisms of the impressed sign developed by solar spectographers - laser-cut with more than 2200 lines through millimeter - to produce colors roughly corresponding to those of the rainbow on the contrary remarkably increased in both saturation and variety of hues

In these expanses the colors bathed unusual surfaces and objects: the ancient brick-faced vaults, a cache of fragments from a marble architectural frieze, colossal busts of emperors and empresse Erskine high hilled the prisms on slow-moving motor-driven frames in like manner that the refracted colors constantly changed. Saturation also varied, according to the sun's brightness, thus the effects in the five representation Rooms, as they were called, were not ever the same. Paradoxes abounded: joyous tints appeared in the melancholy Vapor expanse where intense rainbow-hued clouds of water vapor spewed from the "smokestacks" of a plastic art that resembled a miniature factory. Mass for Endangered Species, previously compos for radio by the agency of Odland with the environmental unimpaired group Terra Infirma, included a voice intoning the names of endangered mammals and birds, while in a corner a digital reckoner enumerated the number of species estimated to have become extinct during the the show's duration (4704 in 49 days - a number based upon Nobel laureate Edmund Wilson's calculation that individual species becomes history every 15 minutes).