| Essay | Artists Quotes | Year of the Artist |
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The Travelling Temple of Light. A Year of the Artist project hosted by UWE . The Travelling Temple of Light is an exciting new portable pleasure-house touring the Bristol,UK area in summer / autumn, 2000. The Temple is a camera obscura, which means literally 'dark room'. Images of the scene outside are projected through lenses onto screens within. Temple visitors, or 'voyeurnauts', sit inside surrounded by moving pictures of the outside world. A camera obscura seems the perfect vehicle for a 'secular temple' - at once simple and profound, it focuses attention on the wonder of light and the sensory apparatus with which we perceive it. The project is inspired by the sedan chair obscuras that toured Europe in the 18th century, providing drawing aids for both amateur and professional artists and spurring the first experiments in photography. The beautiful, wooden temple structure is based on a form used in sacred architecture for 2000 years, from the pagan pleasure domes of Late Empire Rome, through Persian mosques, to the Classical Baroque of 18th century England. This obscura, however, has a twist. Visitors are supplied with drawing materials and encouraged to play the part of the pre- photographic topographer, while all the time being under surveillance by 21st century web technology, via an integral webcam. The observer will be observed. A built-in pinhole camera will capture photographic evidence of Temple vistas.
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