On the opening night of the 61st Venice Biennale, people gathering along the Grand Canal looked up. Above San Clemente Island, a luminescent green beam cut through the night sky with a vast halo projected high enough that test signals were detected from the International Space Station, some 250 miles above Earth.
The work is Higher Power by British light artist Chris Levine. Its material origin matters: Levine collaborated with optical engineers and physicists in Germany to modify a military-grade laser system. The beam in its original form is infrared and invisible. Levine’s intervention made it visible, made it green, and in doing so transformed its meaning entirely. A technology engineered for targeting becomes an instrument for collective looking.
Levine’s practice has long been shaped by meditation and an interest in expanded states of perception. His earlier works, including a holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II captured in a moment of stillness, share a concern with interiority and with what happens when we slow down and attend. Higher Power extends this into the public sphere and into the open sky. The artist has spoken of wanting viewers to reach a “collective state of meditation,” describing the work as being about collectively looking up and going deep inside.
The political dimension is not subtle, but it is earned. With conflicts escalating across the Middle East and elsewhere, Levine’s repurposing of military technology into a peace signal resonates beyond gesture. He has said the green light gave him the idea to “make light, not war,” describing it as something that suddenly resonated. The work does not lecture. It redirects.
There is also something worth noting about scale. Levine has described photons leaving Earth’s atmosphere as making this art on a cosmic level. For artists working with immateriality, light, and presence, this raises real questions about where a work begins and ends, who its audience is, and what it means for art to exceed the walls or even the atmosphere of the exhibition.
Higher Power is visible nightly above San Clemente Island until midnight, across seven nights. It sits outside the official Biennale program, yet it has already become one of its defining images. A green line connecting the ground to something much further away.
