The experience for the spectator is one of total immersion as the light moves across the room and their body, overlapping in complex ways to produce shimmering galactic constellations. This aspect of filling the space differs from the formal restrictions of film, in which light is projected and viewed from one point, bound to one end of the room with the spectator at the other. The Light Ballets indeed detour into mass culture, utilising and making reference to film, technology and design. As director of the MIT Centre for Advanced Visual Studies from 1974 to 1993, Piene pursued the possibilities of collaboration between art and technology, not too dissimilar to the contemporaneous New York-based Experiments in Art and Technology, most closely associated with Robert Rauschenberg, which likewise sought to introduce artists and engineers for ambitious and otherwise unfeasible projects.

Piene used the term ‘painting with light’ to describe the Light Ballets, distancing himself from a recent history of gestural painting in the 1950s to a more technologically optimistic utilisation of light, in relation to recent experience. The light spectacles with which Piene was familiar were in the context of war and his experience as an anti-aircraft assistant aged sixteen, the blazes of fire and the searchlights that populated the night sky in the hunt for the Allies’ bombers. The sky was to hold further importance some years later for Piene, in 1969 coining the term ‘sky art’ to describe events and artworks that draw attention to the relationship between the sky and the urban landscape beneath, typically utilising his signature inflatable sculptures.

The recent history of technology, and specifically light, as a medium of war was a premise that Piene looked to investigate and rewrite on a clean slate with light presented as a source of life rather than destruction. This was a core belief of Group ZERO, founded with Heinz Mack in 1957, as ‘a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning… The incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new’, following the trauma of World War II. With the new place of technology in modernity soon to present itself in the context of the space race, Piene’s Light Ballets evoke a specific time whilst suggesting new possibilities for painting with light and the advent of installation-based practices that seek to surprise and overwhelm the spectator.