SPECTRUM OF LIGHT

 

Quoting from an article in  Astrobiology magazine 

 

“The Voyager 1 spacecraft, after traveling about 4 billion miles into space, turned around and looked back home. From such a distance, the Earth appeared as a pale blue dot, a single point of light suspended in the vast blackness of space. If aliens from much more distant worlds were to look at our solar system, the Earth, if it could be seen at all, would seem even more tiny and faint. How could they know that dot of light represents a world teeming with life?” 

 

The answer, according to the same article, based on what we humans do to try to identify life-supporting planets, includes various scientific exercises to do with measuring mass and then gets into the “photometrics”, breaking that dot of light down into its component colours.

 

What this means is that, over inter-planetary distances, light is the best way of finding out about life and its imprint on a planet.

 

These are the reflections that the work The Spectrum of Life draws on, evoking a planetary scale in a humble pizzeria in Bristol, or perhaps staging the pizzeria as the centre of the universe. The installation was attached to the window of the pizzeria so that in the daytime, natural light projected an image inside it, while in the evening, the interior light projected an external image.

 

Site-specific light installation - mixed media, Bristol 2014