Chris Meigh-Andrews

Extract about the work of Chris Meigh-Andrews from A History of Solar Power in Art and Design, Alex Nathanson, Routledge, London and New York, 2021.

A History of Solar Power: Art and Design

Chris Meigh-Andrews is perhaps the most prolific artist in this relatively small space, as well as one of the first.
Meigh-Andrews is a British media artist and video historian that has been working heavily with video since the 1970s. Since the 1990s he has been incorporating sustainable energy systems into his video and audio pieces, starting with a wind powered installation in 1994 and a PV work the following year. In his PV works, Meigh-Andrews is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and poetic possibilities of movement, the transformation of energy, and the “parallels between energy and thought.” Often, these concerns intersect with explorations of the history of technology and the contrast between natural systems and man-made systems. His work also brings up important questions about how art influences society and how the evolving use of sustainable energy systems changes its ability to communicate.
His work engages with sustainable energy technologies, not as a starting point that generates something from nothing, but as embedded within larger systems and networks. He is interested in their ability to transform and transduce, and the metaphors derived from those functions. Meigh-Andrews attempts to create meaning in his work through the relationship between the physical presence of the objects, their functions, and interconnections between those objects. In much of Meigh-Andrews’ work he presents the viewer with a series of visual connections and processes that they can identify and decode. Once they trace the path of the transformations, the concept of the work emerges.

Meigh-Andrews’s first work to incorporate photovoltaics was Fire, Ice & Steam (1995), a multi-room installation exploring the industrial heritage of the Cleveland, North Yorkshire region in the UK. In one room, four framed PV modules were mounted on each wall of the gallery space, with each one connected to a 12 volt battery and tiny LCD monitor. The monitors displayed a looping time-lapse animation of an ice cube melting and refreezing. The ice formed the phrase “that time.” The lights in the room would sequentially turn on and off in a clockwise pattern. The turning on and off of the lights was meant to draw the viewer’s attention to the light source, but the flickering had no interaction with the video and only minimally produced any power from the PV modules. Meigh-Andrews intended the work to convey the relationship between energy, light, and time. In the context of the broader installation relating to industrialization of that region, the work also speaks to the contrast between agrarian work cycles, which generally coincided with sun-hours, and industrial labor, which made use of artificial light. While the PV here was functioning, it wasn’t self sustainable. The lights weren’t powerful enough and Meigh-Andrews had to charge the batteries in the evening from the grid.
Mothlight (1998) depicts a computer animated moth flying on solar powered video displays. The work references the origins of the term “a bug in the system,” which refers to the story of a moth that interfered in an early computer’s circuitry. Through this metaphor the work explores the delicate, and often abrasive, relationship between technology and the natural world. The indoor installation used artificial light, from halogen light bulbs plugged into the buildings main grid-tied power supply, to energize the PV modules, which were connected to CRT video monitors. The video was played off of a U-matic machine with ¾ inch tape. Meigh-Andrews views the work as a “set of nested illusions” moving from the digital animation of the moth, the suggestion of motion as the moth image flies to different screens accompanied by panning audio around the room, and the mechanical motion of the mobile from which the monitors, lights, and PV modules are suspended. The artificial light powered PV system adds an additional layer to the illusion to the work. A later iteration of the work, Mothlight II (2001), used the solar panels to power wireless transmitters that sent the video signal from DVD players to digital projectors. The artist considered this an extension of the symbolic flight of the moths. In addition to continuing to explore the relationship between technology and nature, Mothlight highlighted Meigh-Andrews’ subversive use of renewable energy. He often blatantly uses artificial light or wind, clearly powered by plugging in to grid-tied wall outlets, to activate solar cells or wind turbines. He writes, “Solar panels aren’t used to generate electricity, but act as passive conductors, transducing light from the domestic mains power point. Meanings are created via an inversion of the ‘conventional’ application so that electricity is serving the poetic, rather than the technological.”

Meigh-Andrews’ 2002 installation For William Henry Fox Talbot is perhaps his clearest exploration of connecting PV solar power to the history of photographic technologies. The work, created for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Digital Responses, was a reaction to William Henry Fox-Talbot’s 1835 image of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey. William Henry Fox-Talbot is the inventor of one of the first photographic processes, and the latticed window image was one of the earliest photographs he took. Fox-Talbot’s original image marked the emergence of one of the most important technologies of the last 200 years. Meigh-Andrews work responds to this by creating a facsimile in the relatively new and similarly important technologies of digital photography, networked computer systems, and PV solar power.
In Meigh-Andrews’ installation, a solar module installed on the roof of the abbey powers a video camera that produces an image of the window composed like Fox-Talbot’s original photograph. As with the original, sunlight enables the image to be captured. In the original, the transformation from physical object to recorded image is enabled through a light sensitive chemical process. In the recreation, it is a photovoltaic-powered digital one. A live feed of the image produced by the video camera was transmitted via an ISDN phone line to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The received image was projected on the wall of the museum, at full scale, in real-time. Fox-Talbot’s book The Pencil of Nature, which when it was published in 1844 was the first book of photographic illustrations ever published, was displayed adjacent to the projection at the museum. Fox-Talbot’s original image was delicate. At the time that it was taken, he had only recently figured out how to fix the image so that it wouldn’t quickly fade. Meigh-Andrews recaptures some of this precariousness through his reliance on solar.
Though it was not his intention, this piece harkens back to an early role of PV systems as relay points within larger networked systems that enabled information to be transmitted. In this instance, the information being relayed is not purely data, but also symbolically transferring the light from the abbey that was activating the PV system and being captured by the camera to the museum wall. One could imagine this relationship being extended even further today with the use of fiber optic networks.

Interwoven Motion (2004), a temporary ten day long outdoor installation that used both PV solar power and wind power, was installed in a remote area in Grizedale Forest in Cumbria, England. The piece focused heavily on the relationship between landscape in art history and the conflict between the “natural” and “man-made”. In this work, Meigh-Andrews temporarily attached four surveillance cameras around the trunk of a tree. Four solar modules were also attached to the tree, while the wind turbine was mounted on a tall pole. The camera’s images were routed to a weatherproof LCD monitor via a video switcher. The speed at which the video feed switched, as well as the order of the video feeds to be displayed, was determined by the wind velocity and direction. The artist struggled to find equipment that was energy efficient enough to run off of the system. He ended up using very tiny security cameras and a small monitor. This provided enough battery capacity to run the setup for 72 hours in the event of inclement weather. Visitors to the area would potentially see the wind turbine and solar modules from a distance, but the video could only be seen if one happened upon that particular location. If a visitor was to find the work, they would encounter it without any accompanying text or explanation of any kind. It would be up to them to arrive at an explanation of the piece or keep walking without thinking much of it all.
The artist considered the piece to be a partial step toward creating an installation that spoke directly to the landscape in which it is sited, in a symbiotic relationship to the land. The work can be understood as a quasi-structural video piece. Meigh-Andrews was not primarily concerned with the content of the images on the screen, but rather the moments produced by complex interactions of environmental and technological systems. He writes,

The specific video images produced by the installation were in themselves of no direct consequence- they were simply part of a flow of very subtly changing ephemeral moments. For me, the relationship between the light and the wind was at the core of the work. The light and wind provided the source of the images both in terms of the generation of the electrical power, which supported the video and electronic apparatus and in terms of the direct physical and visual experience that became part of the work. (Day/night, ambient light and the movement of clouds, and foliage, the changing weather conditions, etc.)

This piece accomplishes something relatively difficult and unique in the video field, that is more common in other fields, like sound art, which is the symbiotic and direct relationship between aesthetic output and environmental conditions.

The artist was also interested in the contrast between the durability of the tree and the delicateness of the technology outdoors. The use of sustainable energy also brings to mind the inverse relationship, that of fragile ecosystems and environmentally destructive technologies. Other themes in this work that can be found throughout Meigh-Andrews’ practice include the use of PV modules as a surrogate for a tree’s leaves.

Meigh-Andrews’ most recent work that incorporates sustainable energy is a series of small sculptural pieces exploring the notion of contradictory ideas. Impossible Object Number 1: Imagine (No Pollution) (2016-2017) explored the “misplaced optimism regarding the role of renewables to ‘save the planet’”. Lamps shine on solar modules, which power a small music box that plays the first few bars of John Lennon’s “Imagine” on repeat. As with most of his indoor pieces, the lamps are intentionally and clearly plugged into the wall outlet: A commentary on how renewable energy sources are a crucial part of the solution to climate change, but they are only a part. Renewables like solar or wind are often misunderstood and held up as a saviour technology, but a particular technology alone cannot save the planet. These technologies and their successful implementation are always a part of larger technical, economic, and social systems.
In the time since Meigh-Andrews began working with sustainable energy their prevalence in both the built environment and culture has changed significantly. When he first began working with the material few people knew what a solar panel looked like, and some didn’t even know what they were, which created a certain set of challenges. Now that they have become pervasive, their potential as a physical object that can be interpreted by a viewer has changed. Writing in 2020, Meigh-Andrews described the shift in the public’s perception of the materials he was working with and its impact on the poetic potential of his work:

The environmental issues have been brought into much sharper focus, as there is a far greater public awareness of the danger to the environment posed by the use of fossil fuels. For example, in my earliest work visitors were not always able to immediately recognise the function of the solar panels as transducers of electrical energy, but now these objects are so commonplace that they are not perceived as remarkable or intriguing and their potential as a symbolic or poetic device has been considerably eroded. This shift in consciousness makes the environmental dimension of the work too dominant, and weakens its impact and potential, and this requires that I either accept this and move on, or try to discover a new level of significance and relevance for them in my future work.

For Meigh-Andrews, the ability of the viewer to draw connections between elements in an installation is restricted by these changes. As these objects become further utilized and more present in our built environment, a development that Meigh-Andrews regards as positive and crucial to combating climate change, the more immediate recognition of them by the viewer limits this introspective aspect and curtails the sense of wonder he hopes to cultivate. Additionally, as the meaning of these objects get further tied to climate change related concerns, there is less of an opening for the viewer to make their own unique judgments of the work. This is a difficult balancing act, because without at least some level of knowledge about the underlying technology the viewer can’t fully decode the installation and arrive at its deeper conceptual meaning.

This position is an inversion of Allan Giddy’s belief in the need for artists to move past the technology so it can disappear. Meigh-Andrews’ position runs counter to both artists who want the technology to fade into the background, like Giddy, and those that are primarily interested in the larger cultural significance and connection to climate change. None of these conceptual threads are inherently more valid than another, but they demonstrate the numerous ways that the technology can be utilized and interpreted.