Over the past six months, on a patch of desert ranchland outside Marfa, Texas, one man's mysterious vision has been taking shape. First, nine massive chunks of quarried black marble were trucked in from northern Mexico and craned into a circular formation, echoing Stone and Bronze Age erections in the British Isles. Next, one of the megaliths, the "mother stone," was outfitted with a state-of-the-art solar array; at the same time, the other eight were carved to integrate LED lights and speakers. Soon—during a full moon, it is foretold—the whole thing will come to life.

According to artist Haroon Mirza, the layout of the stones was inspired by a 4,000-year-old site in Derbyshire, England, known as the Nine Ladies. There, if local legend is to be believed, nine women were turned to stone for dancing on the sabbath. Likewise, Mirza’s project, known simply as Stone Circle, seems frozen in time, juxtaposing long-forgotten cosmological and ritual uses for art with newfangled ways of harnessing and relating to the heavens.

"It’s neo-Neolithic," Mirza says. "The idea of it is at least 50,000 years old. But the technology here is very contemporary, and almost, for this area, futuristic. In Marfa, since this project started people have only just become interested in solar energy."

Early in the process of developing Stone Circle, host arts organization Ballroom Marfa partnered with renewable-energy company Freedom Solar to install the panels on the "mother stone." Freedom Solar donated half the installation up-front and rebated additional money for every new solar customer that Ballroom Marfa referred. This incentivized local supporters of the project to experiment with solar panels on their homes and to talk about solar power with their neighbors.

Now the project has recovered nearly the entire cost of the installation, and at the same time increased solar kilowatts generated in and around Marfa by 3,000 percent. "By trying to fundraise, we ended up embarking on this campaign for solar energy," says Ballroom Marfa director Laura Copelin. "That was an unintended consequence—a surge in solar energy in West Texas."

Stone Circle may have launched an unexpected solar-energy movement in a part of the country best known for crude oil, but the project’s roots lie in its creator's fascination with far more ancient technologies. Mirza, 40, grew up in the UK as the child of immigrants and became fascinated by stone circles as an adult, touring archeological sites with his now-wife. "It's clear that they were referencing celestial objects," Mirza says of the ancient builders of sites like Stonehenge. "But why—whether it was ritualistic, whether it was a science experiment, or whether it was other reasons—is kind of unknown."