The Guardian G2 26.02.04

How does this field of lights work?

Ian Sample

The 1301 fluorescent tubes are powered only by the electric fields generated by overhead powerlines.
Richard Box, artist-in-residence at Bristol University’s physics department, got the idea for the installation after a chance conversation with a friend. ‘He was telling me he used to play with a fluorescent tube under the pylons by his house,’ says Box. ‘He said it lit up like a light sabre.’
Box decided to see if he could fill a field with tubes lit by powerlines. After a few weeks hunting for a site, he found a field, slipped the local farmer £200 and planted 3,600 square metres with tubes collected from hospitals.
A fluorescent tube glows when an electrical voltage is set up across it. The electric field set up inside the tube excites atoms of mercury gas, making them emit ultraviolet light. This invisible light strikes the phosphor coating on the glass tube, making it glow. Because powerlines are typically 400,000 volts, and Earth is at an electrical potential voltage of zero volts, pylons create electric fields between the cables they carry and the ground.
Box denies that he aimed to draw attention to the potential dangers of powerlines, ‘For me, it was just the amazement of taking something that’s invisible and making it visible,’ he says. ‘When it worked, I thought: ‘This is amazing.’’

Daily Mail, Letters Page, 21.02.2004

Tall and short story
Colin Britton.I’ve often heard of the phenomenon of fluorescent tubes glowing when placed below power lines (Mail) but have never witnessed it before.

Times Higher Education Supplement 20.02.2004

Physicists pylon the praise for artist's insight
Steve Farrar

It is only as the sun sets that the collaboration between installation artist Richard Box and Bristol University's physics department comes to life.
A sea of household fluorescent tubes lights up around an overhead power line close to the M4 motorway, giving substance to the otherwise unnoticed electrical field that permeates the area.
The work, dubbed Field, was inspired by Bristol physicists' pioneering work on the effects of magnetic and electrical fields on human health.
Mr Box has spent the last year working at the department. He mostly collaborated with its glass blower to create art from neon tubes. But he also talked to Denis Henshaw, professor of human radiation effects, whose research has inspired an investigation by the National Radiological Protection Board.
" I wanted to describe what happened within the field," Mr Box said. "There is always a power loss along any overhead power line, and the fluorescent tubes- all 1,301 of them- make the power loss visible. The result has surpassed all my expectations."
Professor Henshaw praised the artwork. "It is very hard to explain to the public what these fields are- that's the beauty of Richard's work," he said.
" To have an artist make something about quite specific physics in an artistic way is inspiring to us"
The amount of light emitted by the tubes varies according to the weather, and the presence of someone walking among them can plunge those tubes near them into temporary darkness.
The Bristol physicists will visit Field for a private view next week.

FIELD Press Release

The Physics Department at the University of Bristol has played host to a number of artist residencies. In 2002 artist, Richard Box was awarded a Leverhulme Grant to become the department's third artist in residence. Whilst the starting point for other artists has varied, Richard's main interest was in the specialist glass blowing workshop that is integrated alongside the rest of the physics research activities. His interest in glass has always required him to have objects made by others, this residency offered him the chance to begin to learn how to develop his own glass blowing skills and so have greater authority over his own work. The highly skilled glass blower based at the University makes specific glassware for all the science department's needs. John Rowden was enthusiastic to pass on his knowledge and to work closely with an artist who was interested not only in learning these skills, but to re interpret some of the functions of what are primarily very beautiful looking objects. The influence of glass on all aspects of scientific discovery should not be underestimated, from the lens to the test tube, from the liquid helium dewar to the optical fibre.

FIELD represents a considerable development in Richard's work, whilst previous projects have included ambiguous glass objects much of the outcome has been photographic. FIELD is a major undertaking which will include the installation of several thousand ready- made glass fluorescent tubes. The bulbs will be 'planted' across the site at the foot of an electricity pylon, and will pick up the waste emission from the overhead power line. The piece is simple yet spectacular, making visible what would otherwise go unnoticed. The FIELD of tubes will flicker into life across the hillside as the early evening light fades. The performance each evening is hard to anticipate since it is heavily dependent on the weather. In all the best traditions of land art it is conditional on the variations of the great outdoors, and requires its audience to be patient. Here a parallel can be struck between FIELD and Walter DeMaria's, Lightning Field sited in the Nevada Desert - many visitors travel for days to see it, camp beside it and are lucky if they experience the sort of storm that will make the lightning dance across the 'field' of conductors.

Richard Box is specific about the best time to visit FIELD, and, as you leave your car at the car park just off the M4 (see information on how to locate the piece) you embark upon the 10 minute walk so starting your experience of the work. There is something of the demonic 'end of the rainbow'; we see giant rows of pylons across the countryside but how often do we make the journey to stand at any proximity to them, pitting our scale against these great architectural forms and the comparative vastness of the landscape.

From this site we discover that we have been guided to the top of a hill from where we can see west out across Bristol and towards Wales across the Severn Estuary, always reminded that, although we feel as though we are in the 'country', in the background we can hear the continual murmur of the traffic on the M4 and the drama of the pylon.

University of Bristol

University News Issue 19 April 2003

Making light of physics

Nick Riddle

On certain nights in the past couple of years, at the top of a hill near Skenfrith in Wales, unwary walkers close to the pylons have been confronted with an unsettling sight: a solitary, quiet glowing brain, complete with spine, suspended just above the ground.

This apparition is the work of Richard Box, Artist in Residence in the Department of Physics, and has its origins in a rumour about overhead power lines. 'So I jumped into a van with some bulbs, found some pylons, and tried it. And they lit up.'

The Brighton-born artist, who moved to Bristol in 1995 to join Spike Island Artspace, was intrigued and began experimenting underneath the power lines. 'I was getting two-millimetre arcs between my fingers and the tubes,' he says. 'At moments like that, I'd start thinking, "Okay, I should go home now".'

Richard contacted a fellow artist who specialised in glass-blowing and outlined a few of his ideas - including one for a long neon tube bent into the shape of a human brain. He took the result back to the welsh hillside, placed it under the pylons and made a series of timed camera exposures.

'I was very impressed', says Professor Henshaw, whose study of the health effects of close proximity to power lines is internationally recognised. 'It's very creative and it illustrates graphically that power lines do indeed have these electrical fields around them. Even when the bulbs are on the way out, and start flashing or flickering in their sockets, they still light up under the power lines.'

In 2002, Richard became the Department's Artist in Residence and began learning the techniques of glass-blowing in the Glass Workshop. 'The idea is to leave a permanent commission here,' says Richard, 'but also to enliven discussion and art and science.'

There's an interactive element to all this, too, if you go to the site itself. 'You affect the lights by your proximity', says Richard, 'because you're a much better conductor than a glass tube. And there's sound as well as light - a crackling that corresponds to the flashing of the lights. There's a certain smell too, and your hair stands slightly on end.'

'I told him we should have a national event where everybody does this across the country, like the Jubilee chain of bonfires', says Professor Henshaw, 'but there is an element of risk to this - I'm not sure we'd want to encourage children to do it.' Richard has plans to do an installation in Wales that would be open to small numbers of people, but the logistics and the legal considerations have yet to be worked out.

Funding for the post ran out in mid-March, but Richard is still getting to grips with the craft of glass-blowing. 'This is a labour of love.' he explains. 'I can see it carrying on for quite a while.'

Cliff Gorman

For example, whilst Artist in Residence for a year at Bristol University, he amassed large numbers of fluorescent lighting tubes from hospitals and institutions around Bristol. The tubes were arranged in a field and near to overhead power lines. The electromagnetic emissions caused the tubes to glow in a way that was markedly affected by the position and proximity of spectators. The work vividly brought to public attention, in a creative and interactive way, how the effects of scientific and technological developments can sometimes remain hidden.

Richard’s work typically exhibits a fusion of science, art and nature and during his residency at Taurus in December 2002 he explored ways of harnessing the wind coming across the flood plain of the River Severn. In the same way he had used discarded fluorescent tubes at Bristol, at Taurus he planned to use discarded satellite dishes to produce outdoor kinetic light sculptures. These would appear as luminous objects, which by their movement suggests floating pulsating spheres of light.

A recent article in the New Scientist described a fresh theory for the phenomenon of ball lightning.The suggestion that ‘fulgurites’ (hollow glass tubes formed when lightning strikes the ground, melting the surrounding soil) play a part in the birth of fire balls was intriguing and gave rise to the name From Fulgurite, for his installations at Taurus. By fascinating coincidence, at an illustrated talk Richard gave about his work a member of the audience recalled how he had indeed been witness to ball lightning at Ruardean and how it was a relatively common occurrence at Ruardean Hill.

Richard’s sculptures, by the nature of the effect they wished to explore, are sited on the roadside field at Taurus. His approach was to first build several maquettes that acted as working models on the technical side, whilst also giving a three dimensional indication of their eventual appearance. Many technical aspects had to be considered. Could satellite dishes be cut to form revolving vanes and provide sufficient power to a geared dynamo to produce sufficient electricity to light fluorescent tubes along their perimeter and to give the pulsating light effect he sought? This would require sourcing re-claimed components, and only actual trials would establish whether the theory would work in practice. In tests, the bearings reduced the efficiency to an extent that prohibited the use of this technique. With time slipping by, Richard decided to investigate an alternative solution.

In the end he scrapped the use of actual satellite dishes in favour of the lighter hollow tubular rings which formed the mounts for the dishes. The resulting structure took on the appearance of an anemometer. Instead of using fluorescent tubes to provide the glow-like effect of a fireball, Richard experimented with different paints - paints that would fluoresce in the ambient light levels of the roadside site. It is at dusk that the three ‘balls’ that make up From Fulgurite take on their glowing nature.

In addition, Richard has created an artwork called Rods and Cones. Throughout the car park, and on the entrance road to Taurus, he has mounted hundreds of pairs of coloured glass marbles on wooden stakes. Their back hemispheres have all been silvered using an aluminium coating. At night, when car headlights fall on the marbles, they reflect back giving the impression of nocturnal animals waiting in groups to take over the night shift.

Richard Box's neon brains emerging from their cabinets and jiving away in response to sound stimulus seem to link us back to the weird science of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and send us ahead to the "Tomorrow land" of bio-technologies where the body may become redundant.

Accompanied by a sequence of black and white photographs that show the artist shaking microchips out of his head, Bow seems to literally begin to unravel before our eyes. It is as if he wishes to be rid of the mortal, fleshy body, in favour of a new model, still in production. An enhanced technology of being that can withstand the jolts and jumps of life.

The same questions the attended Mary Shelly's controversial novella will continue to be asked. What constitutes the self, the soul, the mortal body? Is it possible, or even desirable that technology and genetics can work together to redesign the human body? What are the consequences of this knowledge and its implementation? Science has made the body into a territory of ethical inquiry as it fragments more and more the sense of the completed self. We have entered the age of the mechanics of being, where new meaning attends the existential proposition of being and nothingness.