Lightning Redux is a collaborative effort between Mathias Kessler and Carlo Latasa, which features artificial lightning as its main event. Kessler’s collaborator, a San Francisco scientist, has built a Tesla coil that can generate lightning. In a pitch-black room, the sheer power of a sublime experience can now be recreated and witnessed in continuous succession. The smell of lightning in the air makes the event visceral and real.
Photographed in Latasa’s studio in Marin County, California, the piece takes Kessler’s recurring interest in staged, mediated sublimity — elsewhere pursued through icebergs, freezing mirrors, and gradient paintings — and pushes it to its most literal extreme: not an image or simulation of a natural force, but the force itself, artificially generated and repeatable on demand. Commissioned by Site Lab, Grand Rapids.
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