“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” (Roland Barthes)

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Faraday Cage is currently ticking away in the old Power House on Cockatoo Island – the former convict prison and dockyard for shipbuilding in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Following on from his recent experiments with electricity, the new site-specific commission is a clear highlight of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

The artist had been working with early William Henry Fox Talbot negatives, buying as many as he could and making his own positive images with them, true to the original techniques. This Photogenic Drawing project then led to the Lightning Fields body of work, where he applies electric charges directly on to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The resulting formations rely on chance and suspend the electric charges in time as still images.

For this ode to Michael Faraday, a pioneer of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, a series of light-box mounted prints from the Lightning Fields series line a staircase where visitors ascend towards a thirteenth-century sculpture of the fierce Raijin, the Japanese God of Thunder. Nestled amongst the beautiful, dusty and redundant machinery the artist had added an apparatus that gives off intermittent volts of electricity, adding an element of shocking sound that makes the silence in between all the more eerie.

Sydneysiders were also fortunate enough to have Sugimono give the Biennale keynote opening address. He spoke about his extensive background as a collector and dealer in Japanese and Asian antiquities as being driven by an unshakable desire to “see with ancient eyes”. He also outlined his recent architectural work for the Izu Photo Museum at the foothills of Mt Fuji in Japan, and his building plans for a theatre space at a nearby mountain. So is he becoming less interested in photography? The performing arts are a natural progression from the medium, he said, theatre is much closer to photography than painting.

In the 18^th century Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research into electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In 1752 he is said to have attached a key to a kite and flown it in a thunderstorm, proving – at great danger to himself – that lightning is electrical.

Electricity at the time was perceived as a mysterious force that could kill, revive life, or otherwise bend the laws of nature. Luigi Galvani’s experiments with making dead frogs twitch on application of electricity in 1771 led to reports of electrically revitalised human corpses in the medical literature – ideas that Mary Shelly was familiar with when she wrote Frankenstein in 1818. While she didn’t name the electrocution method in the birth of the monster she described the doctor being witness to electricity’s potential when he saw a tree get struck by lightning, and electrical revitalisation of monsters became stock theme in later film adaptations of Frankenstein and the modern horror genre.

In 1831, Michael Faraday established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept, leading to the invention of electric generators and transformers, dramatically improving the quality of human life forever. Interestingly, Willian Fox Talbot – who was a botanist and the inventor of colotype photography – had collaborated with Faraday on several experiments with static electricity and it is by analogy with electrical terms that he named ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ photographic images.

Fox Talbot’s frustration at being unable to draw had led him to construct a ‘drawing machine’. While on holidays at Lake Como (where, incidentally, Mary Shelly had spent time and set part of Frankenstein) he noticed how the Italian sun burned his skin and he began thinking about how light might be able to mark other surfaces.

He discovered the photosensitive properties of silver nitrate, a substance known to change properties when exposed to light, and he began transferring plant shapes directly onto the surface. Then he began putting the paper into a camera obscura, creating negatives which, unlike the daguerreotype (the Polaroid of its day), allowed for multiple prints of each photograph.

In recent years Hiroshi Sugimoto became fascinated with these early Fox Talbot negatives, embarking on a project to buy as many of them as he could and make his own prints with them, true to the original techniques. Appropriately, this Photogenic Drawing project then led to his experiments with electricity for the Lightning Fields body of work (pictured here), made by applying electric charges directly to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The series marks the artist’s desire to return to the inventions of these 18^th and 19^th century scientific pioneers, and to retrace the early relationship between discoveries in photography and electricity.

As part of Sugimoto’s ongoing inquiry into the scientific and philosophical implications of the medium of photography, a Lightning Fields installation is planned for the Biennale of Sydney this May. The director David Elliott announced the project at the program launch last week but as yet no further information has been released.