Techniques: Luminal Music

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Not all the light artists were homegrown in psychedelic land. Most of them have tried their hand at forms of conventional painting or sculpture, but they are likely at the same time to have Ph.D.s in physics, to have worked as display artists or rocketry engineers. Among lumina's leading lights:

∙Britain's John Healey, 72, an inventor and former manager of a textile-processing business in London. In the past 14 years, he has developed his moving prismatic geometric light abstractions which are now exhibited as art and are also in use in London's University College Hospital to soothe patients.

∙Gregorio Vardanega, 43, a native of Italy, studied painting and sculpture in Argentina, now works in Paris, where he shifted seven years ago into luminous constructions, like his blocklike, architectural "chromatic progressions." His goals in art are to produce "precision, harmony, cleanliness and order."

∙Britain's Takis, 42, is a philosophic Greek who began his odyssey into space-age media in 1954, while waiting at the Calais station. He became fascinated by "the signalization of the railways. I thought how dramatic this 'signalization' was, how necessary a part of our century." Ever since, he has been putting together odds and ends of old army tanks, trucks and planes to form cryptic beacons, panels of flashing green, violet and red aircraft-landing lights, needles that sing with an electronic Zorba whine.

∙Texas-born Frank Malina, 54, now a UNESCO adviser on astronautics in Paris, was a cofounder of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Starting out to make "a little bridge" between science and art, he began with strings, wires and painted plastic screens. He calls his finished squiggly luminal needlepoint paintings "Lumidynes," has built some ten feet high.

∙West Germany's Heinz Mack, 36, one of the Group Zero, abandoned painted abstractions in 1953 to study philosophy and logic for three years at the University of Cologne. Artistic illumination came to him in 1959, when accidentally, he stepped on a piece of aluminum foil on a sisal rug, was delighted with the light reflections on its newly embossed surface. Today he uses plastics, spotlights, rotors, polished aluminum foil and nubbled glass to recapture this "amazing, profoundly changing" phenomenon, says that "to me, light plays the same part that color used to play for painters."

∙West Virginia-born "Pete" McClanahan, 33, graduated from the Cincinnati Art Academy, did displays for the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan before beginning light constructions in 1964. His classically simple Cloverleaf employs relatively elementary wiring and hidden fluorescent tubes. McClanahan believes that "the promise of light is incredible to contemplate, but it may be disastrous for some at first, until the use of the medium is mastered, as classic Oriental drawing must be mastered, by constant training."