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There's a growing movement in sculpture today called luminal art which uses light itself as its medium and combines ardent technology to explore the artistic possibilities of light color movement and sometimes sound my guest today is Earl Ryback one of the leading little artists who is also a young nuclear physicist and an inventor this Saturday on Feb tenth the Howard wise gallery in New York City will present a one man show of his light works which will continue through March second Mr Rabbit just what is meant by the term luminal art and low Mullard simply employs light as the basic creative medium Now how does this differ from what Francis normal painting you're using color like form well in luminal art the form is caused by. Projection of light power by using luminous objects now actually there's a very wide scope luminal are being created by a number of people but the common denominator of luminal art is simply that you're using an energy source light and using it in a great variety of ways to create a new art form it usually involves kinetics it usually involves color and it has a somewhat different aesthetic from painting what are the differences from the aesthetics painting for example when you paint with light. The entire process of mixing color is very different from when you are combining colors on a pallet if you keep adding more and more color you'll end up with something that's very muddy and something that looks sort of grayish or brownish light on the contrary when you keep mixing cut it gives you white because all parts of the spectrum mixing proper proportion will get you white the physics of mixing light and the results of color blending is additive roughened subtractive What is the history of luminal art where you're at the seed and in terms of other people that have done this kind of work in the past the man that really began luminal art is Thomas Wilford who was doing works in the back in the late one nine hundred twenty S. and thirty's and right through the present time he has done some of the most beautiful things that have been created in the MIA his work at the Museum of Modern Art in the Lumia suite is probably the best known and he pioneered this entire approach to light and continuously run into a problem met by many luminal artists that people haven't yet really gotten the idea that it's art because it involves light and it isn't on account of us although our scope is broadening people yet haven't fully realized that this is an aesthetic unto itself a sidelight on that is that Thomas Wilfrid felt that luminal art was such an independent art for that he felt that like sculpture dance. Theater it should have its own generic term Lumia and endeavored to make Lumia the eighth art form I would say that is statically he was very successful and now at the present time suddenly luminal art is taking hold. And it here and so are beginning to do wonderful things with the medium Thomas Wolfe himself is in his eighty's and he is quite happy with this whole development because it's partially his dream coming to fruition Can you explain you know he is in his eighty's and he was doing this in the early twenty's in this country why did forty five here now what is happening now that it's catching on I don't know that can be explained to me it's inexplicable they just wired other people who are getting involved in this form of Thomas Welford he was literally alone in this forum although are some others in different countries but they never really had the impact of Wilford there was Healy in England who's been working for a number of years I'm a different aspect of light and there have been others but somehow they were few and far between and the stumbling block has always been the public's attitude towards it now and in the last ten years or so what has been considered art has greatly expanded in the public's eye just. To emphasize how our attitudes have changed it's hard to realize but the whole concept of abstract art being art is only about fifty years old do you feel that your part in school or over a movement not really because I've been doing my own work very. Much as something that I'm doing rather than as something that I see is a movement the movement is happening clearly I don't feel myself part of a school or part of a movement in the sense that I'm working with a group of people because I do my work independently. However clearly there is a school the recent show at the Howard was a gallery which was. A festival of light had approximately thirty artists working in light doing various things with light and one of the most fascinating things about the show was that no two artists were doing the same thing each person had his own approach each person was into things that were quite different in concept and scope and more different from each other than any two paintings could possibly be you had to show there was a new media by commas Wilfred and also a new medium by you correct now where there are there's substantial differences in take me feeling between the two you're. Well I've discussed Lumia with Thomas Wilford I have never seen the inside of one of his I'm not quite sure how he gets his effects we have discussed philosophy and I think that our philosophies of life concur in many areas mine do differ from his in some respects but in terms of the mechanics of it in terms of how we get our effects I expect the approach is probably a similar but I could not say that they're the same or how similar they are because. I've never seen the inside of a Thomas Wolfe or you don't maintain your philosophy of life is not something that you can describe. To a layman's know audience what is your philosophy of life of life or of life. Sometimes they come together well life has things that are much like life is a matter of fact for example Life is a hammer all changes life moment to moment will give you different effects and in a Lumia the work as a family you may see something which is momentarily exquisite. But the next instant it's gone and this is one of the beauties of it because it will likely come back in a little the eventually but it has the quality of being changing of being not permanent of the work itself is permanent the image that you see keeps shifting and evolving and growing and dissolving in front of your eyes and much like life it has the feeling of change of shift of mood of rhythm of time itself which is I feel an intrinsic part of Lumia in a way your mystical life Oh absolutely you're both a choreographer and a sculptor of light because you shape it you bend it you reflect it you virtually carve it with three dimensional sculptures and you program the interplay of the various effects so that you are playing one effect in combination with another and indeed are choreographing the light I'd like to discuss the form is that your art takes a break and three basic forms they're called. Which we discussed in. Which is that right but where did you start with the Lumia. It was the first approach you know the earliest approach was something that I call them and. It involves basically they were effect of polarization of light and this is something that evolved from laboratory studies on materials at school where you are testing effects of radiation damage where you are testing Strength of Materials one uses polarized light to. See what is happening under stress to various materials and you make models which will show the stress well some of the effects you get a quite beautiful and the color effect fascinated me because color always had seemed to be something that would have tremendous potential as an art form in itself so I start to explore it and then I began to search for materials which would give me more vivid effects which would be more dramatic in their response to different types of formations and different types of structural change and gradually I discovered materials that would produce effects that I liked and then combined them like collage and since the whole effect was Luminol you had to have light to create the images to see through the all these materials I gave at the name of the show. Which describe the form that that takes just describe the actual physical shape of this. Surely there are two forms one is very large in which I do this on a surface measuring several feet and with and this is usually done by using a radiant polyesters and using crystals that are grown very large and a steady source of light behind it in a light box effect the interesting part of the is that as you shift your position relative to what you're looking at what you see changes in. Fact unless you're standing in exactly the same place when you look back at what you've seen it would be quite different and two people looking at exactly the same work standing a foot apart from each other would be seeing the same thing again it's like life where two people can look at the same thing and see something quite different here what they are actually seeing what is presented to their eyes is quite different so the change there isn't juiced by the motion of the person looking. Then I was intrigued by the idea of having them move on their own so I started to make them small slides and program them into a projector system so that the projector does the moving and of all the slides of stationary the images you see projected keep shifting and this way you control the rate of motion of the type of flow that you get so these tend to be projected on your screen and can be fairly large and oh yes they can be as large as fifteen people if. You have one of these in the Electric Circus here in New York yesterday right when a friend of mine who'd taken L.S.D. said that this particular pattern of your age there was as close to anything he gave the scene as the effect of the listing was this in your mind when you when you did not really as a matter of fact it sort of was something that came after the fact and it constantly amazes Bay because people who clearly have never taken L.S.D. Well look at my work and say that's psychedelic isn't it. How they would know I don't know if there was a backers convention at the First National City Bank where my work was shown on that the auspices of things even modern art and I was there standing by one side and I heard Midwestern bankers and people from all over the United States who were Obs absolutely very conservative types look at the work and say psychedelic art. So it seems to be in the air rather than in the work. Of moving on to another form called Newman or where you as I understand it take light patterns and they're controlled by actual music. Tate's And according to this is an accurate description yes. How did you know this is your own invention first of all no one else is has done this will have made color organs and people have done a number of variations on sound or sound activated fountains and sound activated lights I think my own particular configuration is something that no one else has been doing Can you describe at all the process by which you translate sound into color and. Well in general again it's first of all you take the sound and you tap off a few percent of the signal in your lad I developed a circuit which relates frequency groups to each other but not just by highs and lows midrange but by groupings of areas frequencies which will interrelate and where various parts of the circuit affect each other so that what you see is the interplay of the sound rather than just different frequency groups and then I projected on a screen where I'm combining multiple projections each one of which is representing particular parts of the audio spectrum being presented and these can change so the different parts of what you're seeing will shift to the net effect is that what you see on the screen is a fairly good representation of what you're hearing both the screen will represent the sound in movement. And color and intensity and in form. And. The form part of it since music doesn't really have a form it's partially happenstance because of the way the productions are combining but you can control since the forms are basically and one stage of the work painted on you can control what types of sounds control what types of forms and the size and the interplay of the forms so that. When you let the machine sort of go when you sort of let it take on its own life it really will translate different types of music in different ways and the Beatles look different from Beethoven can you play any kind of music on the machine once it's program yes whatever you feed into the lumen are will be translated by the human are into a moving color pattern into a moving panorama of light which will keep fluctuating going to the music and keep translating music into the image it decides on could be do this for our interview surely it will translate for us in fact that the singers come out very well and. Mr I think you started painting your your interest in art we figured painting is that right yes. My interest in art has created on a creative level was figurative because it was nothing more beautiful than a beautiful woman and I was doing it though as an avocation and with no thought of being in calories or being in museums and my painting was just something that I enjoy doing in the press release it does for your show at the Howard was gallery it says that you have a highly personal aesthetic which is at the same time romantic and mystical do you feel this is true oh yes I think that the romance of light. Is enormous and the mysticism that you experience when you look at a Lumia can be very profound and one of the nice things about working in the media is that once you have created the work it does take on a life of its own it takes on moods it goes through changes and phases and you can stand back and enjoy your own work performing its thing which you can't do is readily as a painter because it's more static so that you can get the mystical experience from your own work doing it is very honest about doing the work is a matter of knowing the type of text you want watching what you're getting gradually changing what you're getting into what you want and converging on your goal where what you're getting is continuously influencing the form that you're striving for so that gradually as you build you're looking for certain things to happen and you're creating them the mystical experience of partially When you achieve the result you're looking for and there it is and then it will play again and again sometimes as many of my works like love me as well take on the order of ten to fourteen hours to repeat so that they do have a sense a life of their own I recently built one that has a cycle of one hundred fifty hours do you have an image of what you are before you begin Yes an image of what I want and even more an image of a feeling of the type of reaction that I want to get from my work some things that will happen will inspire in myself and other there was a feeling of awe like if you are watching at night watching a night sky and suddenly you see a shooting star the sudden kinetic effect in the. Analogy of the stars against the blue night is very dramatic and you feel the sense of wonder if you're watching an aurora borealis at night you're seeing a light work nature's finest and you get this feeling of wonder if I can create this feeling if I can create this mystical sense of all and of wonder and produce it in the viewer then I have achieved my goal one of the things that I I wonder when you speak of this this mystical feeling does the actual technological aspects of sharing these things be there in the boxes almost like a television set that the human urges have a projector which you can hear if you're sitting near it and. Do you feel that this distracts from the experience when you're. Not necessarily if you're consciously aware of its block then it might but I do believe that you lose the awareness of the fact that it is plugged in when you're watching the work because in the same sense as you lose the awareness of the fact that a canvas has wooden frame behind it stretching it you don't necessarily feel the tension on the canvas you don't have to necessarily feel that whole working is I think you hide what you're saying is a connotation of something plugged in is therefore in a different realm and what we're doing is using energy which is freely available to us now not free but available to us. And we're using it in a way to give us static pleasure we do this in many respects this is nothing new in itself but I don't think the fact that one must plug along. Detracts from you when it really is in here like the human urges where there's no reason for the projector itself but depends how it's set up I don't know people to set in the closet where there's a little hole in the door you never see the projector and it projects on the wall opposite making a constantly changing wall and you never know that there's even a projector involved you just see the wall which is continuing when you speak again of this. Sense of wonder and awe. Something like the knowledge has been used in store to curation discotheques like the Electric Circus and do you feel that is more decorative than art or is this perhaps not the wrong setting for something that is that is profound an expression is what you described before when you say something describe something as decorative it rather dissolves into its environment this on the other hand creates an environment where on one occasion we showed a moment of projection in some store windows it was bitter cold and people would stop and watch for ten fifteen minutes at a time in this bitter cold what was happening now something is decorative is something which you just passed by and is not really in and of itself noticeable but to me that the managers I believe in that sense are not simply decorative they certainly attract your attention and hold it to me are fascinating but you don't inject into. Where people put them is really up to them I don't object to it because often they are not just about how they become a distinct part of the foreground especially because the motion even the slowest and most sensual motion will attract attention just because it's there as motion and will. You will feel its presence more than a static object you do feel the presence of the Lumia do you see a time when. The warm and prevalent in popular in traditional school I see no reason why it shouldn't be I think that when this art form becomes more quickly accepted and people begin more and more to recognise it as something of a joy that is art where people don't feel that it is artificial to enhance their lives the more people will have them as objects as they might have sculpture perhaps not as they would have a paint but perhaps as they would have a sculpture you've said that the possibilities and scientific technology aren't I just beginning to be exploring and I wonder if you have any idea where they can go from here. Future possibilities if you will see my crystal ball is always a bit cloudy but I think that because of the newness of luminal art and because of the newness of kinetics we can. Now chart fully the directions of the future but we can see that we're at the early stages where pioneering where at the stages that abstract art was fifty years ago we are creating something exciting I feel I am I feel that the response the positive response to the work is such that it will not only continue to grow and as people as artists become more aware of the technological tools of their disposal they'll tend to use them more there's no reason why some of the discoveries are being made daily and laboratories could not be turned to a static uses more dramatically they really are protector. They are in many ways that are part of the design you see around you in many implements but often they're not as directly tuned in to what he would consider a purely aesthetic object and they should be and can be Mr Ryback thank you for this interview my guest has been the young nuclear physicist inventor and artist back a one man show of his life works will be held here in New York City opening Feb tenth at the Howard wise gallery thank you and goodbye for now you have been listening to Patricia Marx interview join us again next Friday at five when once again we bring you the Tracy Marx interview.