Sky Chasm was an environmental installation and performance series where museum visitors create dramatic time-travel differences between phase-entangled photon pairs.
Sky Chasm
Sky Chasm, created by Shawn Brixey in collaboration with the Laura Knott Dance Company was a site-specific installation performance designed for Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany 1987. The project was commissioned by Documenta GMBH, and further funding was provided by the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PTR Optical and Hughes Aircraft Corporation.
Documenting the world of art every five years for 100 days, Documenta attracts more than 500,000 visitors during each exhibition. Documenta 8 artists included Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Christian Boltanski, Gary Hill, Jean-Luc Godard, Bill Viola, Dara Birnbaum, Gerhard Ricther, Alfredo Jaar, Robert Wilson, Tony Oursler, and Nam June Paik.
Sky Chasm was an environmental installation and cyclical performance series that used lasers, custom optics and electronics, choreographed dance and the flow of crowds visiting Documenta to interact with and sculpt minute time-travel differences between phase-entangled photon pairs.
Using real-time audible holographic-interferometry, spherical wave-fronts of laser light are magnified millions of times their actual size as they enter a complex series of nearly flawless lenses and mirrors. The delicate optical system in Sky Chasm was designed to detect minute spatio-temporal fluctuations in the time-travel of photons inside the system – fluctuations that are generated because of tiny mechanical and atmospheric disturbances created by dance performance and the massive crowds moving around the installation. The installation instruments detect and measure spatio-temporal disturbances as small as 250 millionths of a meter, making the artwork sensitive enough at close proximity to register a heartbeat, the subtle organic oscillations of crowds moving nearby, or automobiles at a distance.
Installed in the park like setting of the 16th Century Orangerie Museum in Kassel, Germany, Sky Chasm was comprised of an environmental installation and cyclical daytime and night performances designed to explore the relationships of space, time and scale across macrocosm and microcosm. During the nighttime exhibition and performance, individuals near the installation and performance space would encounter the surface of a large transparent isolation platform floating slightly above the ground. The platform was staged with a 50mw HeNe laser, custom designed optical bench, series of mirrors, micrometers, lenses and other optical instruments as well as electronics. With the sensitive instruments on the platform removed from direct contact with the ground, only as the visitors neared the work would their infinitesimally small vibrations be detected, dilating and changing the time travel of the photon's in the art work. The travel-time dilated photons (from the laser) are projected 25' away on to a 24" x 48" ground glass screen, producing stunning modulated holographic interference patterns. At the center of the screen, miniature photonic and electronic sensors convert (in real-time) the light from the laser interference patterns into electricity then amplified into audible sound.
The cyclical day-time and night-time performances by The Laura Knott Dance Company used the installation and its instruments, as well as the 5000 sq. ft. surrounding performance area as a live, hyper-sensitive interactive surface capable of capturing the most minute movement of the dancers and the crowd – melding them together within the shared microcosm and macrocosm of the installations images, sounds and performances.
The electrical signal created by the holographic pattern from each nighttime performance are recorded and stored for use the following day. These audio recordings are routed to multiple sun-tracking arrays of mirrorized loud speakers installed on fluid-head industrial tripods, aiming their reflected sunlight at the Hercules Monument 7 kilometers away. The amplifier driving the speakers have the volume adjusted so low that they are inaudible, however the inaudible sound is strong enough to rapidly modulate the surface of the speakers with three-dimensional standing waves produced by the sound.
These inaudible sound waves encode the light reflected from the surface of the mirrorized speakers with amplitude-modulated sunlight, light that contains the dramatic sound of the people and the performers from the previous evenings holographic patterns. The series of daytime dance performances initially seem silent until museum visitors don specially designed headphones that allow them to step into and listen to the light - immersing themselves in the sounds created by their presence in the artwork the evening before.
The title of the project comes from the rather remarkable and poetic understanding that the scalar distance of a human on Earth compared to the size of the magnified wave-front of light used in Sky Chasm, is the same scalar distance as the Earth is to the sun.