Transistorized Tunnel of Light

How about a trip that will dissolve the floors of memory and identity, becloud the boundaries separating reality and illusion, return the traveler momentarily to his primal, psychic self--all without benefit of hallucinogens? Such was the offer being made last week by Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Gallery. To bring off the most spectacular environmental light show ever staged, the gallery had assembled $400,000 worth of materials and labor in its "Magic Theater," a kind of transistorized tunnel of light designed by eight leading U.S. light, kinetics and environmental artists.

Strobes & Sadism. In what rapidly became an ambulatory return to uninhibited childhood, spectators first passed a wall of ten shimmering, plastic prisms designed by Charles Ross, next tripped up and over a glass-decked platform conceived by Stephen Antonakos, with giant candy-colored neon tubes flicking on and off in programmed patterns, lighting them from beneath and above. The experience told them exactly how an ant feels walking across a Coca-Cola sign. Then it was on to James Seawright's electronic cathedral, where their movements were recorded by an electronic brain that transmitted signals to each of twelve surrounding black Formica columns, causing them to emit soft, strange organlike notes, eerie wind effects and gentle light patterns.

Harder to take was Robert Whitman's black-draped funeral fun house, hung with violently vibrating Mylar mirrors. A screaming oscillator sadistically shivered the viewers' eardrums as it shattered their reflections on the mirrors. Equally diabolical was Boyd Mefferd's mini-discotheque, where strobe lights flashed up through colored plastic panels in the floor with such seeming moderation that many of the younger spectators felt an irresistible urge to sit or lie down in order to get closer to the beams.

Time Lag to Infinity. The sonic boom-boom room by Howard Jones was lined with aluminum panels that responded with chimes, thuds and snatches of live radio programs as viewers moved in front of light-sensitive holes in the panels. Spectators first wiggled their fingers in front of the holes, ere long were prancing about frenetically in an attempt to activate as many different ones as possible at the same time. When they realized how silly they looked, they progressed to Terry Riley's Time-Lag Accumulator. There each viewer individually recorded laughs, hoots and remarks on a tape in one of twelve anterooms. The tape was then played back simultaneously with tapes made by his companions in a central room, creating "a collage of noise."

Last stop, but a favorite of many, was Stanley Landsman's Infinity Chamber, in which 6,000 tiny lights on the black, mirrored walls were reflected to create what seemed like an infinity of mirrors. The illusion of airy weightless ness thus engendered permitted viewers, in the words of the show's organizer, Ralph T. Coe, to "leap straight into the fourth dimension, experiencing what the astronauts have described when they walk in space." Still better, as far as the frazzled gallerygoers were concerned, everyone could leap straight out of the fourth dimension without having to worry about a re-entry problem.

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