On August 11th 1999 Fine Artist David Haslam of A Graphic Design Company invited a group of artists down to his studio in Newlyn, Cornwall to collect data and images of the solar eclipse from which to create a series of collaborative artworks.  The first of these was a webcast of the eclipse.  The second a website which was to be continually updated as the project developed, the third a gallery installation and the fourth a cd rom release through Iris Light records, a label known for its determination to explore and encourage unusual and diverse releases.

Sound Installation artist Andy Gracie, from Liverpool, designed and built a solar probe to record light, heat and electromagnetic data from the sun as it passed through its umbral states.  He also wrote a computer programme to translate this data from the probe into midi files for live web-streaming to musicians over the net.  The intention: to receive back compositions based on the eclipse data.

In addittion to this, Andy also recorded Very Low Frequency radio emissions during the days leading up to the eclipse.  These pure sounds were converted into a bank of samples which would late form the basis of a gallery installation entitled Positron Array.  The consisted of a second probe hung in the roof of a gallery in Manchester.  The data it collated from changes in the intensity of light and heat fired the VLF samples and generated a soundscape in the gallery.

Film maker, Barry Hale MA brought down a camera team of six to cover the eclipse itself and the peripheral visual phenomena associated with totality.

·      Camera one was trained on the sun in its passage through eclipse.  This image was fed live to the computer David Haslam was controlling the webcast from - video and midi stream.

·      Camera two was trained on the harbour at Newlyn to record the general scenes in the path of totality.

·      Camera three was set up on Newlyn Harbour, framing only the sea, with the intention of recording the passage of the moon’s shadow across Mount’s bay as totality hit.

·      Camera four was trained on the side of a white trawler on the slipway to record a peripheral visual phenomenon; the shadow banding effect sometimes seen just before and after totality.

·      Camera five was placed so as to record two other peripheral visual phenomena- the closing and opening of flowers during the 2 minutes 23 seconds of totality and the pinhole camera effect of sunlight falling through leaves which can project multiple images of the sun in states of partial eclipse.

·      Camera six was set up at Marazion to film totality as it fell over the abbey on St Michael’s Mount.

As events unravelled and it was clear the cloud cover would severely compromise some of these camera positions, we sent cameras three and four further north.  To no avail... Totality was captured by one of three camera positions further north.

David Haslam coordinated the webstream, keeping the channel open and maintaining video and midi streaming.  Simultaneously he monitored activity on the website through a second machine networked with the first.

Meanwhile, Dr David Lawrence, equipped with yet another pc, was answering e-mail enquiries from people in need of advice on how to log onto the site and download either our webcast images or the midi stream.  Dr Lawrence also found time occasionally to monitor the webcast, accessing the site through a second phoneline..

Following the eclipse webcast we learned that the site received 194,000 hits on the day.  The document detailing those that hit the site, when finally downloaded, was 11,000 pages long of 6 point a4 text.  Just processing this simple text file into smaller, manageable files took the best part of a day.  The detail has yet to be abstracted from this valuable resource.

The second of a series of artworks to be drawn from our eclipse images was an installation in Manchester as part of the Digital Summer festival.  The deadline for this was tight, putting the cd rom on hold as probe two was designed and built by Andy and Barry Hale put together an exhibition tape from the13 hours of video footage we had shot in Newlyn on the11th of August.

The imagery , video and audio files were built into this website and authored for CD-Rom by Dave Haslam of A Graphic Design Company Limited.

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