What Is A Little EMF ("Line Losses?") Among Friends

Submitted by Charles Frost on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 20:06.
Fluorescent Field



Richard Box
(Photo by Stuart Bunce.)

While again fruitlessly trying to clear our archives of accumulated links, we were happily reacquainted with Richard Box's installation called Field.

Realized in February 2004 while he was Artist-in-Residence of the Physics Department at Bristol University, the project involved over a thousand fluorescent bulbs “planted” underneath high voltage AC transmission lines. Unwired, the bulbs drew energy from the surrounding electromagnetic radiation and lit up, making for what must have been a marvelous sight.

Richard Box
Richard Box
(Two stills from a panorama by Matthew Wyatt.)

Quoting a press release given prior to the event:

The FIELD of tubes will flicker in to life across the hillside as the early evening light fades. The performance each evening is hard to anticipate as the daily operation of the electricity supply will differ and is always dependent on the weather. In all the best traditions of land art it is conditional on the variations of the great outdoors, and requires its audience to be patient. Here a parallel can be struck between FIELD and Walter DeMaria's Lightning Field sited in the Nevada Desert [N.B. it's actually located in New Mexico] - many visitors travel for days to see [it], camp beside it and are lucky if they experience the sort of storm that will make the lightning dance across the 'field' of conductors.

It has been remarked that Richard Box was trying to draw attention to the dangers of overhead power lines but the artist maintains that he was simply making visible what is otherwise invisible.

From: http://pruned.blogspot.com/2008/02/fluorescent-field.html
Via: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/emf_richard_box.php

making visible

wow 

Maurice won't even grow food under high voltage

Maurice was looking around the Hough Bakeries site and Lakeview Avenue with me and we discussed all the property along Lakeview that is under very high voltage lines and I commented there are some places no human should live... and Maurice commented he wouldn't even grow food within 75 feet of such high voltage lines. Yet we do allow people to live under such conditions... thanks for the great visualizations of the ignorance of modern man.

Disrupt IT

Voltage

  I am glad that the PD finally picked up on a story I waited for them to revisit it last year, but they did not. 

Any one who has worked at a hospital knows that it is a microcosm of a city.  How well do our hospitals function, especially under crisis conditions?