The Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science, designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison for the 1964-65 World's Fair, is supposed to feel like outer space. The 80-foot-high undulating wall that surrounds the hall is a grid of frosted cobalt-blue panes that, when back-lit by the hardest daylight, glow with the soft strength of starlight. It is essentially a well-crafted void, a perfect space, perhaps, for meditation. But it needed "lightforms'98," a spring exhibition of three kinetic lighting installations sponsored by Art and Science Collaborations, Inc., to make it as exciting for kids as, say, the popular Science Playground just outside.

Of the three installations, Lost Referential, by Montreal artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn, was the most fully integrated into the hall's architecture, giving the space a brain through artificial intelligence (AI). Thirty-two pyroelectric sensors spaced along the walls detected visitors' movements, forwarding the information to a computer hidden in a storeroom. As a first response, one of eight cyberlights spun around and spotlighted whoever tripped the sensor.

An AI program that the artists developed processed the data collected from the sensors, conceiving responsive patterns of light. Sometimes the lights swarmed around an area where people were concentrated. As if the program had changed its mind, the cyberlights then scattered and collected in empty areas of the hall. Sometimes the lights just moved at random.

Demers and Vorn also gave the all a heart, an amplified beat corresponding to the human pulse triggered when someone put their finger in an EKG monitor (subject and monitor were lit by a Source 4 lamp). Sixteen fresnel lights, their amber glow contrasting with the cobalt blue walls, pulsed to the same beat. With eight different sound samples programmed by the artists playing in eight different speakers placed around the room, the installation was quite loud.

Equally dynamic, if less sprawling, was English artist Paul Friedlander's Dark Matter, a vertically suspended, whirling nylon rope of changing colors and speed that filled one of the Great Hall's ten curved bays to a height of 25 feet. Friedlander, who has a degree in physics, spent much of his career designing stage lighting for such rock acts as Pink Floyd before he marshalled his interests for his current profession: building light sculptures that represent theoretical physical phenomena. Dark Matter is not dark. The sculpture is a visualization in light of what some scientists have theorized are cosmic strands that, in invisible concentrations, make up 90 percent of the universe's mass. Friedlander was also inspired by the spinning motion of a jump rope.

Below, a turntable housed in a plywood casing powered the rope's movement. Above, a flat Mylar "space mirror," secured by steel wire cables, was tilted at an angle of 15 degrees in relation to the rope. On the floor to one side was a 4000W HMI arc lamp fitted with a wheel of several different color filters that rotated at high speeds. To the other side stood a pyramidal control station, constructed of thin-walled aluminum tubing, where two downward-pointed sound beams (paired with PAR lamps) awaited visitor interaction.

Moving one's hand in the path of one sound beam altered the speed at which the rope spun. Movement below the other sound beam altered the speed at which the color wheel rotated. The faster the rope spun, the louder the whirring sound accompanying it. The faster the color wheel rotated, the more the vertical bands of color on the dynamic column of rope appeared to converge.

The effect was chromastrobic, a trembling spectrum achieved without the splitting of light. The arc lamp directed light through a 35-inch-diameter Fresnel lens to the mirror, which reflected a column of light downward onto the moving rope. Even though the color wheel in the arc lamp was rotating rapidly, different colors appeared on the rope at the same time because it, too, was in a whirl. Dark Matter emitted enough energy to activate the sensors of Lost Referential, causing that installation's cyberlights to occasionally converge on the moving rope.

Hanging at eye level toward the middle of the Great Hall were three glowing cocoons, designed by Dutch artists Dirk Rutten and Jeroen Kascha. At first their installation appeared simple: conventional 40W bulbs encased in translucent paper, with the sounds of crickets chirping overhead.

But there was more: unseen in the dark were heat sensors jutting out from the skin of the cocoons. When a person came within six feet of the installation and stayed for six seconds, a control box sent a signal up a 40-foot electrical wire into the darkness above. The light in the cocoon went off and, accompanied by the sound of a magic wand, a butterfly with a 15-foot wingspan appeared overhead.

Fiber optics were at work: a computer-controlled 150W or 200W illuminator at the center of the aluminum-frame butterflies lit up 420 fibers in each wing, the colors changing with each metamorphosis. After three seconds, the control box in the butterfly shut off the light, and the cycle was reset. Before the butterfly appeared again, the observer would have to step outside the six-foot radius.

This installation was called Satori, the Japanese Buddhist term for sudden enlightenment, but because of the six-second delay, it took the kids roaming the hall a while to figure out why the butterflies were appearing. Throughout the hall, it was as it light wasn't moving at the speed of light, but had been slowed somehow for the sake of metaphor, and for play.