By Scott Andrews

David Therrien is one of the most storied artists in Phoenix. Locally known for founding the experimental performance and exhibition spaces The Ice House (with current owner Helen Hestenes) and CRASHarts, his own work had not appeared publicly in the Valley for a decade and a half until the weekend of January 16 at the Scottsdale Waterfront.

The massive light and sound installation Beautiful Light, composed of a seventy-six wide bar of girders suspended by crane over the canal at South Bridge, housed the 4 Letter Word Machine, four sixteen foot square alphanumeric quartz lamp complexes that blasted 300,000 kilowatts of white light hourly in patterns that formed discernable words and a chaos of seemingly random shapes that included semaphore, Braille and references to DNA. Below the light bar, hanging from cable, were four human operators who cued the relays to control the light transmissions. Based on a hexadecimal system created by Therrien, the 4 Letter Word Machine has the potential to transmit over four billion messages, and is the latest development in Therrien’s ongoing research in 256 bit alphanumeric coding, which he has used in performances since 1984.

Under the name Comfort Control Systems, Therrien has intertwined the relationship of machines and the human body in his related project Body Drum, which utilizes electrified bodies as switches to control high power light arrays. With connections to San Francisco’s Survival Research Labs, headed by experimental artist Mark Pauline, with whom he has shown, Therrien has explored issues of body politics and technology by using flesh as actual cogs in his machines.

Beautiful Light continues this work, but relocates the body to its constituent energy as light. Illusions to religion and mythology are abundant by the very use of light, though with a decidedly Manichean bent reinforced by the presentation of the words “love,” “hate” and “hope,” “fate” in a sequence that seemed to dissolve the usual attendant values we associate with the words.

Documented by photographer Dayvid LeMmon for Scottsdale Public Art, the images of Beautiful Light shown here are part of a collection available online at www.beautifullight.org