These pics were taken a few years ago just outside Bristol, where the artist Richard Box created the installation ‘Field’ – 1300 flourescent light tubes placed upright beneath a pylon, which light up when the sun goes down. I’ve just got round to uploading them to Flickr.
It was an astonishingly beautiful thing to see.
I understand the whole magnetic fields and earthing principle behind why the tubes lit up, by one thing baffles me. You can kind of see in these shots that the lights lit up as the sun went down – ie, they weren’t on the daytime, and glowed brighter as it got darker. Was that an optical illusion or is there something else going on?