Robin Fox is an audio-visual artist whose work ranges from experimental music and intermedia performances to large-scale installations that enlist industrial-grade lasers that can shoot into outer space. In the past few years, from his home base in Melbourne, Australia, he has developed a number of theater-scale shows in which the electricity sources used to create sight and sound fuse in a synchronized fashion, with electronic music and laser light bound together as one. The most recent example is TRIPTYCH, for which Fox won this year’s “Isao Tomita Special Prize” from the Prix Ars Electronica. The piece was inspired in part by Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, a Polish artist who emigrated to Adelaide, Australia, and started making prescient multimedia work—including painting, kinetic sculpture, and pieces utilizing early computers and laser technology—in the 1950s. After being invited to look through archival material related to Ostoja-Kotkowski in Australia, Fox traveled to the artist’s hometown in Poland and soon after premiered TRIPTYCH at Unsound Festival in Krakow. On July 14, he will perform the piece again at an Unsound satellite event in Adelaide.
Fox has also created a series of monumental public artworks in Australia with the most-advanced laser technology currently available, including Sunsuper Night Sky in Brisbane (2020), Beacon in Hobart (2022), and Monochord in Melbourne (2022). During a discussion with Art in America, Fox talked about his work in different mediums on different scales and the ways his synesthetic visions have come to life.
How would you characterize TRIPTYCH and how it fits into your work?
It’s the latest installment of audiovisual pieces that I’ve been making for almost 20 years. The first installment was work for an oscilloscope, audio-visual films that were my first attempt to create a sort of mechanical synesthesia, with synchronicity between audible and visible voltage. I was obsessed with that and toured around the world, carrying an oscilloscope with me around to noise and punk venues all over. I could make beautiful images on the oscilloscope that were crystalline and clear, but back then I had a Sony Handycam that was running into a shitty projector and then projected onto a sheet in a punk squat somewhere. I became increasingly frustrated with the sound-to-image results.
Then I saw a laser in real life for the first time. I’d never been to raves or clubs in my youth. I wasn’t involved in club culture at all. But when I was playing a show in Melbourne, I walked in and there was a green laser in the corner that had been left on, shooting smiley faces and unicorns in sync with the house music that was playing in the background. I saw that and had a weird epiphany. It was a green laser, and my oscilloscope works were green. A lot of my early work being green is not a conscious choice or an aesthetic decision. It was technically determined. The oscilloscope works were green because oscilloscopes are green. It takes less energy to make a bright green light then it takes to make any other color, because our eyes are ultra-receptive to green light. That’s why technical equipment, like old monochromatic computer screens, are green. We’re geared for green, and that has to do with discerning predators in foliage. We have a much greater level of detail with our green vision.
Anyway, when I was working with mechanical synesthesia, it was never the most common form of synesthesia, which is sound to color. Instead, I was working with shape and movement. I was working with the dynamism of a sound wave and what I discovered to be the inherent geometry nested in a sound. I was able to tease that out visually.
Is that term “mechanical synesthesia” yours?
As far as I know. Somebody else might have used it before, but what it describes for me is the feeling that I had the first time I saw a sound and an image connect in that geometric way. Not all of them did when I first plugged noise into an oscilloscope and started looking at it. A lot of it was rubbish—a lot of it was messy and wasn’t very interesting. And then there was this crystalline second or so where the wave form rectified. The wave form distorted and clipped, and when it clipped, it created corners in the image. I felt like I experienced synesthesia for the first time: I was listening to something and seeing the same phenomenon, literally—not an aestheticized or mediated representation of the sound but an actual physical manifestation of what I was hearing. The two things connected in a neurological way that felt to me like what a synesthetic experience would feel like. I felt like I’d found a way to manufacture it.
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Can you explain the way in which the sounds you create and the light you’re projecting are one in the same?
Well, they’re connected. I’ve called it signal simultaneity. The way I used to work is that I would take the voltage that is required to make a sound come out of a speaker, which is a waveform in a kind of Platonic or abstracted sense. It’s the voltage that moves speakers backward and forward. I take that voltage and apply it to two mirrors that are spinning inside a laser projector. There’s an X axis and a Y axis—they’re the things that displace a single laser beam to create a show. If you’re driving the X and Y mirrors with the left and right voltage of a stereo signal, you’re essentially looking at the voltage that you’re hearing.
So, if soundless, a laser beam would project in one direction, but you introduce waves that displace it?
It’s the way that old CRT [cathode ray tube] televisions with big tubes worked. They had three RGB color guns at the back. Voltage would be sent to those and they would scan using electromagnets on either side. The voltage would pull things from side to side, up and down, and create images through the persistence of vision phenomena. The reason I can draw what seems to be a solid three-dimensional cone of light with a single laser beam is that I’m displacing it so fast that your eyes perceive it as a solid. It’s like when you get a sparkler and spin it around, it looks like a solid circle. Picasso did a whole series of photos like this, where he lit things up and then these sort of drawings in the air were captured in long-exposure photographs. That phenomenon of persistence of vision means you can create all kinds of images just using voltage.
I was trying to recreate sounds visually, and then I realized I could do that three-dimensionally and essentially have people standing inside a sound, or the realization of a sound. When I saw the possibility of making a three-dimensional version of sound with light, that was extraordinary. I thought, that’s what I want to do!
How does TRIPTYCH relate to Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski?
Stanislaus—in Australia he’s called Stan—was an incredibly prolific artist. From his arrival in Adelaide, in the mid-1950s, he was doing a lot of paintings and a lot of design work. He also did huge murals in the city and sculptures with all kinds of materials. He became quite well known in the visual art world in the latter part of his career for getting involved in computer-generated imagery really early on. When everyone was going crazy for Mandelbrot sets, and computers were starting to draw images, he was there bringing his Op-Art sensibilities into computer-generated imagery.
What’s amazing is that I’d never encountered his incredible body of work before, and I’ve been working in the field for 20 years. It’s just bizarre to me. I’d heard his name in passing when I was working on a commission years ago to build a giant Theremin—a huge interactive instrument that sat in the middle of Melbourne for a while—because he built paneled musical instruments that work like Theremins. But I had no idea he made laser work, and that he was one of the first people to do laser shows.
All artists go through periods of personal epiphanies where they think they’ve discovered something, and very often they haven’t discovered it at all. When I realized that I could do what I was doing with oscilloscopes with lasers, I was discovering a technique that was used by all laser-show makers in the 1960s and ’70s. They would prototype their laser shows on oscilloscopes and then move them across to laser projectors that were much more expensive. So I wasn’t discovering anything new, but for the materiality of what I needed to do, I was discovering it for the first time.
How did you come to start looking into Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work?
I was invited by someone at the State Library of South Australia to go through a collection Ostoja-Kotkowski materials, and that happened to coincide with the establishment of a festival called Illuminate Adelaide. I created a work for that called Library of Light (2021). In a blurb for that I mentioned Ostoja-Kotkowski and a couple weeks later I just got a Google-translated block of text from Przasnysz, Poland, where he had lived, saying, “We can’t believe you’re interested in Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work. Would you come and talk to our historical society about him?”
I booked a ticket and it was a beautiful experience. They were so surprised that I turned up that it was a bit like the Beatles coming to town. They were disproportionately happy that I was there, which was really endearing and lovely. I got a tour of the town and the street named after Ostoja-Kotkowski, and a cultural center that’s being refurbished. Hopefully I’ll go back and perform at the opening.
How sophisticated or not is the laser technology you use for TRIPTYCH?
I’m using standard laser projectors that are built for performing laser displays. That technology has increased remarkably since I started. Like all technology, the price, the size, and everything else gets better and faster and more efficient.
There’s nothing particularly special about them—they’re a known quantity. But the ones I use for the large-scale shows are definitely not. They are industrial cutting lasers that companies won’t really sell for entertainment purposes. All the ones that I know are available have been bought secondhand from solar-panel manufacturing companies that have gone broke and sell off their equipment. People buy them and then repurpose them for making displays, but they’re extremely dangerous, and working at that larger scale is a completely different proposition.
How did the prospect of using that kind of larger-scale laser originate for you?
It happened because of the pandemic, when the world changed quite suddenly and led to a complete wipeout of all work for me and a lot of my colleagues. For the first time in 20 years, I was looking at my studio gear for things to sell. Then the director of the Brisbane Festival, Louise Bezzina, called out of the blue and said, “We’d love to talk to you about coming to Brisbane and doing a citywide installation, something that will be visible from a lot of different places and be quite spectacular.” They didn’t want anyone to gather because of Covid, and they didn’t want anyone to have to be in just one place to see it. It’s an oxymoronic brief in a way: to make a spectacle that doesn’t have a particular place from which to view it.
I tried to back out of it because I had done something similar in Melbourne from a skyscraper, using what were for me then the most powerful lasers I could get my hands on. I used them first in an installation called White Beam for the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania in 2013. That was a commission that I did on a tree-lined boulevard with a 30-watt beam. It kind of worked, but I had open fires creating smoke and misters in the trees with moisture coming from the sky—I made a whole environment there. But when you’re up on a skyscraper there is nothing to articulate the light, so I wasn’t sure if it would work. Everybody wants Tron, with lasers shooting all over the city like some kind of science-fiction film. But in Melbourne it was quite muted. There was a counterintuitive kind of light in the sky. People were thinking, What the hell is that—are we being invaded by aliens? But it was very subtle. It wasn’t spectacular.
I explained this to the Brisbane Festival director and said, “I don’t think I can create what it is that you want.” But the more I tried to back away from it, the more they wanted me to do it. Brisbane normally has a massive fireworks display with rock music called Riverfire. They couldn’t do it during the pandemic, so basically my project happened because they couldn’t do the fireworks. I was saying to the festival director, “People love fireworks, and you’re going to disappoint 4 million people by telling them this is fireworks. I can make something else, but I can’t make fireworks.”
How did the equipment you had access to change?
Two companies contended for the job, and when the second one sent the technical specifications of what they had, I didn’t understand what I was reading. I read the specifications of the laser, and it was kind of impossible. It was very powerful, and very, very tight. There was almost no divergence in the beam, which means you can see it for a really long distance because it doesn’t get wider. In this kind of Shakespearean betrayal, I gave the job—a very big job—to the company I’d never worked with. I didn’t sleep for two weeks while making the decision, but I really wanted to see this thing. I thought I might disappoint 4 million people with this project, which would be disastrous, but I decided to take the risk. And the first time I saw one of these lasers shoot from a rooftop, my jaw dropped. It was stunning. You could see it all across a well-lit city, a beautifully articulated beam. All you had to do was make it move a little bit and it would sweep. It was gorgeous. All of the sudden, everything felt possible.
In what ways are lasers of this kind dangerous? I’ve read their beams can travel as far as 160,000 kilometers?
There are all these metrics when you’re dealing with laser safety, particularly with civil aviation, because laser light, generally, even from a standard show projector, can travel really long distances. The light is well-columnated, and its energy is all in one direction, so it just keeps going. There’s a distance within which you should not hit a human being with a laser in the eye—that’s what they call “ocular hazard distance.” Normally, that’s hundreds of meters with a standard show laser. But with these industrial lasers, the ocular hazard distance is 8 kilometers [nearly 5 miles]—you have to be that far away from this thing for it not to damage your eye immediately. That’s incredibly powerful.
The final gradation in the metrics is called “glare distance,” which basically means that if you were looking in the direction of the laser, you would detect or feel something. You wouldn’t necessarily see it, but you might detect it, and that’s enough for them to be worried about from a civil aviation point of view, for pilots with so many distractions.
When you say you wouldn’t “see” it, what would that mean otherwise?
It’s actually just a bit of math, because it’s so abstract. No one’s ever actually stood 160,000 kilometers away from this thing and gone, “Oh yeah, yeah, I can detect something.” It’s an extrapolation.
What kind of damage would it do to the eye? Would it burn it?
You could write a book on the kind of misinformation and mystery that that surrounds ocular safety with laser displays, even within the industry. There are international standards for what they call “maximum permissible exposure,” the MPE, which is very conservative. I do shows legally within the MPE, and [in club and theater shows] I use all kinds of things like lenses to make the beams wider and take the power down. I like to do the show safely because it is not comfortable or enjoyable if you don’t. The International Laser Display Association, ILDA, would have you believe that you can operate a show at 10 times the MPE and it would be OK. But in their estimation, most laser shows that you experience are about 100 times over the maximum permissible exposure. The thing with laser damage to the eye is that it’s not immediate. Generally, the damage would be minor and subtle, and what would happen is you start getting headaches like five years later when you’re reading. It’s not a burning of the eyeballs, but it’s still something that you don’t want to inflict on people. I recently had to get reading glasses. I went to the optometrist and said, “I’ve been working with lasers for 20 years and I’m worried that I might have damaged myself when I didn’t yet know what I was doing.” But there was nothing wrong with my eyes. What that suggests to me is that the international standards are very conservative. But there is still danger if it’s done badly or incorrectly.
How did the first large-scale work at the Brisbane Festival go?
It worked, but I would never do it the same way again. I had to make that one on Zoom. I did all the site visits on Zoom, and I was using Google Earth because we couldn’t travel in Australia at all while we were in lockdown. I was making the piece in a very abstract way, and I remember arriving in Brisbane the first day just and thinking, Oh my god, it’s so much bigger when you’re standing in it! For that project, I had seven of the big lasers, and they were put on seven different buildings.
How much does one of the big lasers cost?
Between 60,000 and 80,000 euros (around $66,000-$88,000). But by the time you’ve done the work to have the refrigeration system that it needs, put a scan head on it, and all the other things that need to happen to make it safe, you probably get to 100,000 euros ($110,000) per unit. The ones that I had in Brisbane were owned by a consortium of laser companies, and they travel around the world. They were in Dubai, and then in Las Vegas. I managed to get seven of them, and I think there were 12 available in the world.
How does the sound component of your large-scale presentations work?
I had to develop a way to synchronize the soundtrack. The sound was on a web app, and you could walk around and experience the audio with the display. You wouldn’t have to gather around a PA system to do it—it could be delivered to a device. Which is also fiendishly difficult to do, because everyone’s got different devices and different operating systems and different Bluetooth headphones. To try and coordinate that was difficult, but we got that working. It’s a web app, and you just hit play.
Your next big project like this was Beacon in Hobart, Australia, in 2022. The photographs from that look quite dramatic…
What I decided to do with Beacon was gather the lasers in one place from which I distributed all of that power. It created a corridor of intensity. When you were standing underneath the lasers, you could see them shoot out into space, and they were so bright and so articulate and precise. It was quite amazing. At one point, there were these little explosions in the beams, and I asked my laser guy, Arthur Ipsaros of Genius Laser Technology, “What is that?!” He said, “Those are insects dying. It’s a massive bug zapper that you’ve created!”
Anyway, it created an optical illusion with planes of light. They went over the mountain, and it looked like the beams just stopped in midair. I got so many messages from people saying, “How did you make the light stop? That’s impossible!” I was like, “Yeah, it’s not happening—it’s a complete optical illusion.” What was amazing is that when you were standing under the lasers, a beam would sweep from left to right. But when you were at the other end, the beam comes from kilometers away and sweeps right over your head in this beautiful slow arc. It was a completely different experience. Since the beams were directly above you, you could turn around, and it looked like there was another laser the same distance in the other direction shooting back. It almost triangulated, as an optical experience, so much so that I started to think that maybe the world was flat. Not seriously, but the scale of something so big distorts everything. You can’t make sense of it.
Would you make large-scale work of the kind again? Do you have any current plans?
Absolutely. I have pitches around to do various things. I’ve learned a lot every time I’ve done one. I made a joke with a journalist in Hobart who asked, “How do you prepare for something like this?” I said, “Well, I don’t have a Hobart to practice on!” It’s not like I can prototype these. These are works that are happen in my little studio in Melbourne, very much in the abstract. When I arrive on site, I see and hear them really for the first time.