Tripping the light fantastic

THERE can be few better places to study light than north-east Greenland. In the summer, there is 24-hour daylight, modulating through a spectrum of colours as the sun circles the sky. In autumn, this gives way to twilight, then darkness.

Artists Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist, who collaborate under the name London Fieldworks, spent a month there last August, when Greenland was on the cusp of the transition to perpetual twilight. Living in tents in one of the world’s last great wildernesses, they used the latest scientific instruments to study the effects of different light on Gilchrist’s physiology.

On their return, they used the corresponding readings and "light samples" to create Polaria, an interactive light installation for an audience of one. The person sitting in the large, semi-translucent cube puts their hands on bronze electrodes and completes a gentle electrical circuit. A reading taken from their body is matched to the corresponding reading taken from Gilchrist in Greenland, and the cube generates the kind of light at which this reading was taken.

Polaria will be shown in Scotland for the first time this weekend at the CCA as part of the Real Art Weekend (RAW), which brings together art events at seven venues organised to coincide with Glasgow Art Fair.

Instead of showing us images, Polaria focuses on that which enables us to see - light itself, which we often take for granted. Joelson, a trained lighting designer who now explores light through her art, says: "People seem to go away respecting light a bit more because of their experience."

Central to the work is how the audience reacts to it. Most of the people who have been in the cube so far have found it a moving, positive experience. One reviewer prescribed it as a cure for the winter blues.

For the first time in this show, Polaria will be shown along with Gastarbyter, its "darker sister". Gastarbyter, a collaboration with electro-acoustic composer Dugal McKinnon, is the soundtrack of an urban wilderness, bringing together sound, light and vibration to subject the audience of one to many of the noises and sensations we filter out.

People who have taken part in Gastarbyter come out speaking of dark imagery: incineration, coming back from the dead. One woman astonished the two artists by telling them it had been just like her alien abduction experience.

"What it emphasises to me is that our experience of the world is a very narrow range of possibilities," says Gilchrist. "What is visible and audible to us is a tiny section of the spectrum which exists. You think because we’re all in the same room, we’re having the same world experience, but it’s not like that at all."

Polaria/Gastarbyter is at the CCA, Glasgow, 12-23 April. RAW exhibitions are also taking place, 10-14 April at The Arches, the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow School of Art, The Lighthouse, Tramway and within Glasgow Art Fair itself. See programme for details.