I caught up with an interesting young man yesterday called Nils Porrmann from Dandelion and Burdock who was in Melbourne visiting from London.  Nils was telling me about a light festival near his home town in Germany which sounded very cool – and here’s the link

LIGHT was and is a decisive factor in the transformation process from the old industrial Ruhr region to the modern metropolis Ruhr. Prominent artists and designers used the technical possibilities of light to create signs of change, often visible from afar, in this metropolis with its versatile town and country spaces.

Wanna get over and check it out?  Too late but never mind because you can see all the good stuff by clicking here

Joseph Kosuth, Sechs Teile, Lokalisiert, 2004 - copyright, for exclusively editorial purposes in connection with the Biennale für Internationale Lichtkunst

We are all nuts about light here at Electrolight, but to my knowledge nobody in our team has bought an 1100 acre volcano site to carry our light experiments.

That sort of caper is best left to the likes of James Turrell.  For the uninitiated, James Turrell is an internationally renowned artist who is obsessed with the exploration of light in art.  James is in Canberra next week to talk about his Roden Crater project and to launch a new installation at the National Gallery called Skyspaces.

According the gallery website ‘Turrell’s aim is to make environments that enhance natural light and dark in such a way that you question the source of the light and your perceptions of what you are seeing. Skyspaces are simple, elegant viewing chambers that frame the sky as pure colour and show us ‘the changing light of the sky, altering what we see with our own eyes’. Skyspaces position us in the moment and reconnect us to the world we inhabit’.

As Turrell explains, ‘we are dwellers at the bottom of the ocean of air. We create the colour and shape of the sky. It does not exist outside the self’. Roden Crater is one of the largest and most audacious works of art in the world. In 1979 Turrell bought an 1100 acre site containing a volcano and began to develop the site as the ultimate Skyspace. Turrell’s vision is to create a number of chambers within the volcano where visitors will experience the sight of the sun and moon, and rare celestial alignments.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the mercury that lives inside your fluorescent lamp at the end of its life?  If you are like the vast majority of people it ends up in a landfill site (a nice way of saying rubbish dump).

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can affect the brain, liver and kidneys, and cause developmental disorders in children. Young children and developing fetuses are especially at risk.  Mercury is found in a variety of products, such as fluorescent and other lights, batteries, electrical switches and relays, barometers, and thermometers. The mercury contained in these products can evaporate into the air or leach into the groundwater from the landfills.

Thankfully, at last someone is doing something about it.  The Lighting Council of Australia is administering a scheme called FluoroCycle where lamps containing mercury can be recycled.  For more information on everything you ever wanted to know about recycling fluorescent lamps check out the fact sheet.