Pull up a bean bag and settle into audiovisual artist Robin Fox’s sometimes frenetic, sometimes hypnotic new show, Constellations. Photo: Bryony Jackson.
If renowned Australian audiovisual artist Robin Fox has achieved his latest vision, visitors will experience child-like wonder at his new free installation at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Acton.
As part of the Enlighten program, Constellations is a mesmerising spectacle of laser lights refracting off crystals, paired with soundscapes to immerse audiences in a sensory experience.
“I want to transport them back to their childhood so they can experience that feeling of wonder and awe that you experience as a child when you discover something brand new,” Robin says.
“Like the first time you cognisantly look at stars or see fireworks, and you’re taken out of every day and into the extraordinary.”
Sixty crystal balls suspended from the ceiling are made mostly invisible by the white lasers beamed into them, which in turn split into explosions of the individual red, green and blue diodes that make them and shoot back out, creating a hypnotic display.
“I love that after all this time, you can still turn a laser on in a room and people gasp because light doesn’t behave that way in nature. The formation of that beautiful columnated beam and precise wavelength of colour is something you rarely see,” Robin says.
“With 60 crystals and six lasers, you have an infinite level of complexity in terms of pattern generation.”
But in this multi-sensory experience, sound is as important as vision.
Constellations invites audiences not to think, but to feel, or simply “be”. Photo: Bryony Jackson.
“Sound is my first love. I’m a composer first, so the connection between sound and light is incredibly important to me,” Robin says.
“While the light is overwhelmingly fantastic, it’s intimately connected to the sound world – sometimes very directly. The electrical voltage you hear is the same electrical voltage you see. You see the movement, but that electrical signal that makes the laser move can also make a sound.
“The moment where vision and hearing are connected so fundamentally that you can’t help but experience this incredibly satisfying feeling; that’s something I have come to call ‘mechanical synaesthesia’. The idea that you can connect these energies – that’s the artistic fascination that has unpinned all my audiovisual laser works over the past decades. I hope audiences experience that in Constellations.”
Constellations comprises a mix of frenetic energy with moments of repose and everything in between. The full show lasts 13 minutes and audiences are invited to drop in, pull up a bean bag and experience as much or as little of it as they wish.
“For some people, five minutes is enough. Others have to be kicked out at the end of the day because they find it hypnotic,” Robin says.
Despite the profound and perhaps outer body-like nature of the show, Robin says there’s no deep or meaningful message behind Constellations.
“Philosophically, I don’t think abstract art has to mean anything. I love the enormous amount of room for slippage between the work itself and what people take away from it,” he says.
“I simply present a situation, people enter, and it’s this cosmological experience that makes one person think of the expansion of the universe, another comes in and remembers the time they ate the wrong mushrooms, and yet another is taken in by the technical aspects.
“I prefer artworks that don’t tell you how to feel. I revel in the abstraction of what I’m making and invite people to not think.”
Constellations is a free exhibition at the NFSA running from Thursday, 27 February, until Sunday, 4 May, with special extended hours from 10 am to 3 pm daily in the Gallery and 4 pm to 7 pm Thursday to Saturday during the Enlighten Festival.
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