‘Spiraling into Infinity’ offers solace with endless light in the dark ★★★★☆

A year ago, when the lights went out in clubs, concert halls and festivals due to the pandemic, light itself decided to step onto the stage, as a more or less autonomous art form. For example, the Amsterdam collective Audio Obscura let the largest light show on earth, the sun, play the leading role in a live stream at the windmills of Kinderdijk. The German designer Christopher Bauder let the light show Skalar ignite in the Amsterdam Westergasfabriek. Event organizer ID&T opened the museum light show amazewhich the public walks through for lack of a dance party.

The light artists of Children of the Light also saw opportunities. The ‘visual artists’ Arnout Hulskamp and Christopher Gabriel previously made light objects at shows by dance band Darkside. In TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht, the duo surprised last year with their own performance Warping Halosin which a circular light was worshiped as in ritual, with the support of magical choral singing and organ work.

And now there is a huge lightwork in the Eindhoven gallery MU at the Strijp-S site. The robust art house had asked Children of the Light to furnish the stripped interior space with a custom installation. It would of course be visible inside, but if the hall had to remain closed due to lockdowns, passers-by could also view the light show through the large windows that turn MU into an art aquarium.

Yet the experience inside is much more intense. In the concrete hall of MU, a roller coaster hundreds of meters long winds from a metal, flexible hose with light strips. The pipeline without beginning or end shoots up, then deep down and spirals along the massive columns. The great thing is, first of all, that you can walk through it. You can choose a position just in front of such a spiral, or just behind it, or lie down on the floor to stare at the lanes whizzing towards the ceiling.

That is a psychedelic experience. Of course, Children of the Light has the endless snake roller coaster, which is not for nothing Spiraling into Infinity hot, adorned with light: LED lights that can take any shape. Software controls light patterns, from flashing individual parts to long light waves sweeping through the entire track. They keep changing in color, from dreamy blue to bright orange and green. Sometimes part of the snake is only lit on one side, so that you don’t see the light but the halo, like the corona of an eclipsed sun. That also produces fantastic images.

The work has a strong meditative effect. In the dark hall, surrounded by a whizzing light and an intoxicating ambient-soundtrack by organist Jacob Lekkerkerker, thoughts go out to the origin of life, the endlessness of the universe. Sometimes the installation seems like a fathomless starry sky, with softly blinking white lights everywhere. Then again a bright blue flash shoots through the entire roller coaster, at dizzying speed. When the entire track is dark, two small orange lights flare up, each going in its own direction, followed by a sea of ​​imitators. A beautiful image, physically overwhelming.

The drawings thus made, in sequences of about twenty minutes, sometimes resemble three-dimensional calligraphies in the air, drawn by an invisible entity, perhaps a god. As a spectator you can stand in the middle of creation and let yourself be surrounded by the comforting light.