Aliens from planet pittsburgh: how two young roboticists from carnegie mellon pioneered digital lighting [scanning our past]

The show started at twilight. On a balmy evening last February outside Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art I sat spellbound, leaning back on a granite bench gazing up at a large white fiberglass canopy that floated several meters above my head. Light projected onto it began to gradually morph from one gorgeous hue to another. Lilac deepened to purple, then shifted to burnt orange, to chartreuse green, and on it went. Meanwhile, through a rectangular aperture cut in the middle of the canopy, the darkening sky seemed mysteriously to lose depth, becoming a flat plane of color that looked as if it had been painted on the ceiling. The interplay between artificial and natural light was hallucinatory: as the hue of the former changed, so apparently did that of the latter. In a silence punctured only by the raucous laughing of a pair of kookaburras the program shimmered on, ending after perhaps an hour, when the sky had become pitch black. A truly magical experience, one that I shall remember as long as I live (Figs. 1-3).