Art Meets Science: Breathtaking Images of the Sun

MITES recently provided projection kit to artist Chris Meigh-Andrews for an installation at UCLAN. For every evening from Monday 9 May until Thursday 12 May, spectacular close-up images of the Sun were projected onto one of UCLan’s giant solar trackers; images that are equivalent to ten times the quality of high definition television and which are being continuously beamed to UCLan by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Chris describes the installation, Sunbeam, as follows:

That the energy harvested during the day can then be used to make an artwork possible beautifully encapsulates Bataille’s notion of art as a form of general economy exemplified in the sun itself. The system that harnesses the sun’s extraordinary power for straightforward and restricted uses, such as supplying energy to the university and to the national grid, is ‘detourned’ to produce a work of art, or in other words something useless according to the restricted economy of reciprocity and exchange. This is, perhaps, the very definition of art itself.

You can see some of the spectacular images from the project on the BBC website.

(Article image: Chris Meigh-Andrews)