The failed heavy metal drummer whose lasers light up the brain

The place where sound meets light has fascinated artists for an age. From laser-striped raves to the legendary son et lumiere at the Great Pyramid of Giza, from Mona Foma to Paul Robert-Houdin’s groundbreaking reimagining of a French chateau in 1952, artists have been drawn to the way each medium builds on, transforms or exalts the other.

The pavilion at Light Cycles, at Illuminate Adelaide 2021Credit:Nick Miller

Plus, it’s huge fun. Which is why â€" coronavirus be damned â€" Illuminate Adelaide has become the newest festival on the Australian arts circuit, with an inaugural program celebrating music, art, light and technology.

Canada’s Moment Factory are the big-budget stars, transforming the city’s Botanic Garden into a psychedelic dream world of light and music culminating in a transcendent episode at an old glass pavilion (its season has been extended to late August).

Robin Fox’s Library of Light at Illuminate Adelaide 2021.Credit:Nick Miller

But Melbourne artists are at the forefront of the festival program, too. On the North Terrace, lasers punch the sky and electronic music booms and throbs from the glass foyer of the State Library, where Robin Fox continues his experiments in synesthesia. On next door’s Art Gallery facade Atong Atem’s lush, charismatic video Banksia (rescued from the wreckage of Melbourne’s doomed RISING festival) plays to delighted passers-by. And, dotted along the streetscape, Carla O’Brien’s Instagram-ready neon sculptures launch into virality via a thousand selfies.

Fox had been researching Polish-Australian artist Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, once a staple of the Adelaide art scene, looking for inspiration. He found the opposite.

“Our work was actually so similar that I felt a sense of complete personal redundance as an artist,” he laughs. “But I took that as a point of departure. You do want antecedents to your work, you do want to be able to find inspiration in artists who have been working before you. And in the field I’m working in they’re actually hard to come by.”

He likes to think his Library of Light, which refracts oscillating colours, shapes and beams from the library to mesmerising effect, as an homage: “Stan would have loved this.”

Plus he can do so much more, with the high-resolution, high-precision, super-bright lasers at his disposal these days.

“You can pack a lot of punch into a projector that he would have only been able to dream of.

“Basically I’m a failed heavy metal drummer,” Fox jokes. He missed the rave scene entirely and “I still just want to play stadium drums, in my heart”. Though he’s famous for his lasers, the core of his work is that meeting place of sounds and music.

Fox is aiming for a “synesthetic moment”. The sounds pulsing from his artwork are generated from the same physical waveforms as the laser light and he thinks that, somehow, we sense that.

“There’s a relationship that’s created outside of your conscious mind,” he says. “There’s something about [the sound] that is transfixing because it’s reflected in every single bit of movement that you’re seeing. And even though you’re not cognisant of that, your ears and your eyes are.”

Atong Atem looks at her video work Banksia at Illuminate Adelaide 2021.Credit:Nick Miller

The fascination stems from his mother: her synesthesia would connect tones to particular numbers and colours. The first time Fox saw an oscilloscope, the green sine wave that turns voltage into image, there was “one tiny second where I felt the geometry of the sound, and the sound itself, locked together in a way that just made my brain come alive”.

We break off to watch the next section, his favourite. “It gets really psychedelic.” Some kids get it: they boogie about the forecourt as their parents stare.

Next door another crowd gathers at Atong Atem’s video. The South Sudan-born photographer is acclaimed for her vibrant portraits of the African diaspora; Banksia grew out of a visit to Melbourne’s Immigration Museum, where she wanted to “create my own version of history”.

Film allowed her to make an immersive work that would draw people through the frame into the space, she says. The final scene of Banksia sees a group of women singing and dancing, a moment of “richness and celebration”, Atem says, the climax of the work.

But music is integral to the whole piece. Nigerian-Australian musician Jerry Agbinya, known as IJALE, suffused his score with field recordings of water, native birds and insects.

“I really wanted him to create his own immersive artwork that exists in tandem with my visual immersive artwork and I think we did an awesome job,” says Atem.

Nick Miller is Arts Editor of The Age. He was previously The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald's European correspondent.

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