First Light

Our resolution of perspective reduces the granular complexity of the particle world into simple forms, allowing us to experience its mysteries on terms and at distances that make sense to us. Artistic and scientific curiosity, however, drives us to look deeper under the surface of our reality, uncovering the behaviours and mechanics behind all that we take for granted, and encouraging us to pose questions about the fabric of our existence.

On the human scale, we consider a vacuum to be nothing, an emptiness so vacant that it requires a specific term to illustrate just how desolate it is. When we think about the vacuum of space we imagine a place that is so uninhabited by matter, it becomes hostile. Questioning the emptiness of a vacuum opens the realm of curiosity where we find First Light. In its immediacy it’s a light producing sculptural art object, but looking within one will find a research laboratory investigating subatomic behaviour within an unearthly environment it creates, monitors and controls.

First Light follows the lineage of Philo Farnsworth, whose Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor inspired a generation of amateur inventors to create their own, forming a collective area of research and study into fusion reaction experiments. In the amateur fusor world first light is a term used when an invention first produces light, a cause of celebration that is often shared with the community. It’s a milestone; the maker and their creation have self-initiated and achieved a sense of significance. In cosmic terms, first light refers to the period of recombination that occurred between 240,000 and 300,000 years after the big bang, where photons could attach to atoms and light was able to amass and stabilise. Known as cosmic background radiation, this light is the earliest light that scientists are able to see. First Light combines these ideas, physically existing as the result of scientific curiosity and engineering innovation, and functionally capable of replicating a process that illuminates the universe.

In its presentation form the apparatus is concealed inside a minimally designed plinth, a hidden city within a white tower. At its peak a spherical grid made from tantalum wire protrudes from a mirror surface, confined within a glass bell jar. Below this, inside the plinth, is a complex arrangement of scientific instruments, built into an aluminium frame. A reinforced rubber tube makes its way from the bulkhead down to a vacuum pump, whilst control circuits push power through a voltage controller and a transformer that can raise the domestic voltage to extremes of 15,000 volts. Whilst this voltage is fed to the grid, the vacuum pump removes the atmosphere from the bell jar leaving a fraction of the atoms that once existed.

The grid is negatively charged at -15000 volts, causing positive ions to be accelerated towards it at great speed. A few collide with the wire while most pass by and out the other side. As they travel further from the grid their attraction towards the opposite charge causes them to slow down, stop, and accelerate back, where the cycle repeats. With this incredibly rapid, pendulous movement happening to millions of ions every second in a small space, collisions occur, and the atomic structure of the ion is disrupted. From our perspective, we see this entire process play out as a surreal, ghostly light suspended within the bell jar. Given the placement and movement of the particles, there is generally a greater concentration of light at the grid’s centre, where the attraction forces are at their strongest.

Collisions at this point can, very briefly, reach a million degrees, which seems initially outlandish, but to give an idea of the potency of the forces governing First Light, we can take a look at fusion technology, which the piece is based on, and what links its subtle incandescent character to the intense enormity of the sun. Specifically more in line with Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC), the nitrogen in the vacuum chamber is both excited and restricted by its relationship to the grid, causing the push and pull mechanism which we see as an amassment of visible light energy. Though the sun’s magnetic field is the force which holds plasmatic material together, and the fuel is hydrogen - four millions tonnes of it converting into the light that we see every second - the basic premise is the same. Continuing the comparisons with the gigantic, fusion can occur as the result of accretion, when the basic components of matter start to rematerialise after a nova in space. The cycle of explosion and accretion manufactures our galaxies, stars, tendrils of more informally arranged matter and everything that we know; it is the factory of elements.

Controls to manipulate the voltage of the grid, and the density of the atmosphere in the bell jar, allow a tuning of the parameters which dictate the behaviour of the light. Through balancing these, or pushing them to extremes, it is possible to alter its size, spread, composition of density, shape and colour. Whilst on surface level this is satisfying in an aesthetic sense, it exposes invisible forces that connect our resolution of existence - zoomed out from the particle world - to the domain of the electron and proton. We are reminded that nothing is almost never truly nothing, and even a vacuum carries the echoes and dust of history. The sensation of witnessing something not native to our perspective of reality is disquieting and captivating. It activates more fantastical, pliable modes of thought that assist in the acceptance of phenomena we don’t have readily available tools to describe or understand. Pulled into this particular frame of thinking, ghosts become real, dimensions become traversable, universes multiply.

In First Light the cerebral mysticism is substantiated by the colour properties of the light itself which, depending on the nitrogen composition of the vacuum, holds itself at varying shades of purple. When more nitrogen atoms are present due to a lower vacuum, the colour is deeper and more vivid; at higher vacuums it lightens. What makes purple an interesting colour in this context is that technically, it doesn’t exist - the colour wavelengths emitted by ionised nitrogen are red and blue. Rationally it should follow that purple sits between these frequencies on the colour spectrum, but where you would expect to see it you find yellow. When we believe we are seeing purple, we are in fact seeing a mixture of red and blue light, their colour wavelengths combining and interpreted by the brain as one. Purple does not have its own wavelength, marking it notably different from the spectral colour violet, with which associations are commonly made. It is generally accepted that purple has links to the supernatural and the unknown, neatly revealing the inherent magic of both the hidden world, and First Light as a device that can help us witness it. It collides shimmering evanescence with structures of human engineering, applying profound properties to an assemblage of metal, glass and circuits.

The apparatus exposes nature and natural situations that transcend orders of magnitude, and vast passages of time. There is nothing asking the piece to be beautiful, yet revealing these things - aeons collapsed into seconds, galaxies forming in the palm of your hand - allows it to be exactly that. Regardless of the viewer’s technical or scientific knowledge, there’s a sense that the profound qualities of what is being viewed are communicated clearly. As a single entity, the glowing component holds chaos, violence and relentless energetic transference at such a distance that we instead see the opposite, a halo of peace. If we were to see the Earth on a similar relative scale, its diameter measurable in a few inches rather than several thousand miles, we would observe the same, with the intensity of human activity and the clash of storms condensed into an orb of tranquillity.

The experience that First Light produces is underpinned by science and meticulous design engineering, conceding to its utilitarian coldness until the moment it is switched on. At that point, the processes and mechanisms unite to express the real phenomena that lie at the heart of all we see. Bridging again the human perspective to the cosmic scale in both time and space, it isn’t a huge leap to make comparisons with the inception of all that is.