British artist Chris Levine has spoken of his desire to “make light, not war”, by using a military-grade laser to create a new installation that can be seen from space.
The installation, named Higher Power, will be switched on in Italy from Monday night to mark the opening of the Venice Biennale 2026.
Levine worked with optical engineers and physicists in Germany to modify a military-grade laser system, with test projections detected from the International Space Station around 250 miles above Earth.
The installation will be visible for the next seven nights, with audiences invited to look skywards as a vast luminescent halo is projected into the night sky above San Clemente Island.
Speaking from Venice ahead of the switch-on, Levine told the Press Association: “The beam itself is normally invisible.
“It’s infrared, but we’ve modified it to give visible light, and it’s green.
“And this gave me the idea – to make light, not war – it just suddenly resonated with me.”
Levine, who has exhibited his previous light installations at Cornwall’s Eden Project and at Glastonbury Festival, said he wanted viewers to reach a “collective state of meditation” with his latest project.
“For me, it’s all about taking my audience towards stillness,” he added.
“We’re bombarded with information. There’s so much going on, we haven’t really evolved quickly enough to kind of process it all.
“So we get ill, we just can’t deal with the overload of stress and information. And we live in unprecedented times, darkness is really showing his face right now.
“I think a lot of people are quite disturbed, and for me, it’s been my salvation that meditation can, on a daily basis, just bring me back to centre so that I can deal with what I’ve got to deal with.”
Projected vertically into the sky, the laser alternates between a vertical beam leaving Earth’s atmosphere, and a geometrically precise halo.
The installation uses a single-frequency 515nm beam, which oscillates at 432hz.
Levine said that with “photons leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and travelling into space at 186,000 miles per second, it’s art on a cosmic scale”.
Levine, whose work includes Lightness Of Being, a 2004 holographic portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II, said he likes to take his work into “new experiential realms”.
He added of his latest installation: “It’s a thrill for me. I’ve been playing with lasers for a long time, but this is quite something.”
With full aviation clearance secured, the installation will be visible nightly until midnight throughout its run.
Levine added: “At a time when so much attention is directed downwards, this work is about collectively looking up, and going deep inside.
“Getting still by tuning into single frequency light, even momentarily, can change how we experience the world around us.”
