Techniques: Luminal Music

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One of the earliest pioneers was a former lute player, Danish-born Thomas Wilfred. In 1921 in New York, he built a kind of visual Wurlitzer, which he called the Clavilux. By moving sliding keys, he activated a battery of projectors behind a translucent screen. He became so skillful that he was able to create what he called lumia compositions—slowly evolving, shifting, glowing abstract patterns. At the Weimar Bauhaus, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy between 1922 and 1930 devised a polished metal and clear plastic Light Display Machine. But such items remained isolated curios ities. It took the 1950s and 1960s to attract a whole spectrum of artists to the medium.

Modulated Nudes. Today, says one of the new luminal artists, the U.S.'s Preston McClanahan, "light is the language of our time." Greek-born West Germany's Heinz Mack declares: "Physics is the same to me as a tube of oil paint to other painters." Explains M.I.T. Theoretician Gyorgy Kepes, a onetime Moholy-Nagy collaborator: "In everything and everywhere, we are surrounded by the technical factors that produce light, and we are no longer frightened by them."

Added to that is the whole 20th century experience of abstract art, from cubism through abstract expressionism, which has taught many that art need represent neither a thing nor an emotion; luminal art, though radiantly handsome, generally does neither. Pop played a role in making commercial techniques acceptable. Peter Myer, 32, constructed Transit Orb out of cello phane designs and polarized plastic filters, which are more commonly used for sunglasses. Manhattan's Earl Reiback, 31, a onetime nuclear engineer, even has fun in taking an object—one of six different nudes—and then modulating the image into total abstraction. To accomplish this, he built his Luminage Projector from two standard Buhl "Carrousel" projectors, altering their machinery so that a full complement of 160 slides would modulate gradually, "sensuously," in one continuous cycle. To achieve his abstract patterns, he painted the slides with transparent chemicals, then aimed a laser beam at some, bombarded others with gamma rays in a reactor to alter their stress patterns. The nudes were photographed in light cast through the slides; their bodies are not painted.

Psychedevotional at Ohm. Op art has conditioned gallerygoers to accept art that visually leaps from the wall to assault the optic jugular. Much luminal art is similarly turned on. The USCO group of Garnerville, N.Y., can induce the hallucinatory traumas that occur in some LSD trips by means of blinding strobe lights—the visual equivalent of the electronic scream at the end of the Beatles' record Penny Lane.

Light art is also showing up in the world of discotheques and happenings, wherever the emphasis is on being with it in the here and now. Manhattan's Jackie Cassen, 28, and Rudi Stern, 30, designed the environmental light projections for Timothy Leary's psychedevotional Death of the Mind. Thomas Tadlock, 25, is the author of a winking, blinking color organ. It can be hooked up with a hi-èfi, responds with a special yellow bulb when it hears the voice of Mick Jagger, looked very much at ohm last summer performing in a Manhattan discotheque.