LONDONFIELDWORKS

Photo: Polaria@Wapping, Andy Paradise

An interactive light installation for an audience of one (2002).

In August 2001 artists Bruce Gilchrist, Jo Joelson and photographer Anthony Oliver traveled to remote North East Greenland to witness the transition from 24-hour daylight to the twilight onset of winter. They used a spectroradiometer to periodically measure and record light and using a range of biomonitors, the body's physiological responses to it. In the field, the artist's body was employed as a sensor evoking both the ethnographer Marcel Mauss' notion that the body is our first technology, a set of instruments with which to generate knowing; and the Chilean biologist and cognitive scientist Francisco Varela's idea of the body as a portable laboratory. The body is both the source of the data and its receptor, both recorder and transmitter of phenomena. The Polaria fieldwork, driven by solar power alone, has given birth to a self illuminating machine, inspired by post industrial concerns over the quality of the working environment and recent medical research into the beneficial effects of polarised, full spectrum light.

Polaria premiered in London in January 2002 at The Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, and toured to the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland.

Polaria was financially supported by London Arts, The Arts Council of England, Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts, (Sunderland), Oxford Brookes University, Clearvision International.

Additional support from Artsadmin, Air Iceland, The Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (C.A.S.P.), The Danish Polar Centre, FujiProfessional, Hasselblad and the ProCentre, Iwasaki Eye, The Solar Energy Alliance, EPFS (Equipment Pool for Field Spectroscopy), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and The Awakened Mind Ltd.