Specifically, the use of colour in spectacle as an art form may be said to originate with the first experiments by the French philosopher and mathematician, Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757). Castel employed candlelight in his Clavessin oculaire of 1734. The device consisted of a five-octave 'ocular harpsichord' keyboard which operated the raising and lowering of translucent coloured tapes illuminated from behind by candle flames. This theories were published in L'Optique des couleurs (Paris, 1740).
In the nineteenth century, further experiments were undertaken by Jameson (1844), Kastner (1870), Bishop (1877) and Rimington (1985), author of A New Art - Colour Music (London, 1895).
In the twentieth century, consistent work with projected electric lighting was under taken by the Danish-American musician, Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) who, in 1928, proposed a coloured-light spectacle on a particularly large scale: a skyscraper surmounted by a 'Clavilux Silent Visual Carillon'. Ever-changing patterns of coloured light were to be projected on to the inside of a translucent glass dome and operated either manually or automatically. Wilfred' first light-projection (Clavilux) system was constructed 1916-22 and employed sliding keys which controlled the light-intensity of a set of six lamps back-projecting beams on to a translucent white screen. It was given its first, silent showings at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York, in 1922. Wilfred was to design over 160 of his Lumia compositions, three of which are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The high intensity carbon-arc lamp was employed by the English light-artist Adrian Cornwell-Clyne (1892-1969) in his Colour Projector of 1921. His machine consisted of a large spectroscope which dispersed spectral lights onto a cinema-type screen. Projection was controlled by a keyboard on which Cornwell-Clyne (known then as Adrian Bernard Klein) performed many concerts accompanied by music, improvising from a range of over 150 combinations of coloured lights.
Following early experiments with his own Colour Harpsichord (1932), Zdenek Pesanek (1896-1965) designed and installed a machine which controlled the operation of over 1,000 tungsten lamps at the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Universal Exhibition. Projected patterns of light, utilising a full potential of almost 250 variations of colour, were recorded on interchangeable rolls of perforated paper fitted to a type of player-piano mechanism.
The French sculptor and musician Yves Klein (1928-62) designed his first Fire Fountain in 1958, and three years later installed his Fire Wall at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany. This consisted of a large grid of metal pipes supporting a double-sided system of gas jets displaying 100 'International Klein Blue' flames. Also in 1961, the French painter Bernard Aubertin (b. 1934) became interested in the art of pyrotechnics and subsequently fabricated a series of so-called Spectacles pyromaniaques.
Later examples of the coloured-light spectacle include those pioneered in the United States by Jordan Belson (b. 1926) and in Europe by Peter Sedgley (b. 1930). Belson, as visual director of the Vortex Concerts (1957-69), performed at the Morrison Planetarium, San Francisco, programmed 50-minute shows integrating a 50-speaker sound system with as many as 70 simultaneous projections of light beams, films, transparencies and stroboscopes. Sedgley has undertaken large-scale commissions, but much of his work is small enough to be accommodated in the domestic interior. Since 1976 he has developed methods of cyclic colour composition, affixing arrangements of dichroic filters on to large circular panels (lit by tungsten lams) which rotate slowly, throwing part-reflected, part transmitted beams of spectral light across the panel's surface. Later installations are activated by solar power, to include his Colorama, recently installed in a public building in Dubai.
Among American artists who have harnessed the laser for their own purposes are Rockne Krebs (b. 1938) and Ivan Dryer (b. 1939). Almost since the invention of the laser (1960) Krebs (based in Washington D.C.) has installed systems of mirrors (and on occasion smoke screens) in order to display the remarkable optical properties of this unique light medium, in programmed interior and exterior laser-projection displays.
