Rudi Stern Lecture tonight

‘ON NEON’ SYMPOSIUM Thursday March 21 2002

‘On Neon’: an evening with Rudi Stern, hosted by the Faculty of Applied Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology

An expert on the general subject of neon, Rudi Stern is also a celebrated artist, designer, historian, and counter-cultural figure. After studying painting with Hans Hoffman and Oskar Kokoschka at Bard in the 1950s, Rudi Stern’s astonishing career included the following:

He was one of the inventors of ‘light art’ in the mid-1960s, working with (for example) the composer Igor Stravinsky, the rock band The Doors and counter-culture guru Timothy Leary in creating light shows for ‘Psychedelic Celebrations’.

In the late 1960s, he was one of the founders of the New York-based groundbreaking Global Village Video, the first portable video production group.

In the 1970s he almost single-handedly established the use of neon as an artistic medium, founding ‘Let there be Neon’ and authoring the seminal text of the same title, the first book to definitively establish the history of neon.

He spent five years in Haiti travelling with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he directed and produced 15 documentaries on human rights abuses there. These were broadcast on 189 Public Service Broadcast television stations.

In recent years, he has created and directed ‘Theatre of Light’, which blends lighting, projections and puppets into an art ‘event’. The basic material of this is 2000 hand-painted slides and 37 slide projectors.

Location: DIT Aungier Street at 6.30 on Thursday 21st March 2002