This open collection is dedicated to the diversity of artistic research and praxis of artists working with light as an artistic medium. It looks back on exploring the assets of physical light in the arts since the beginning of the 20th century. Following a loose time line, it presents aspects, themes referring to light as material and medium in artistic practice.
When 100 years ago, László Moholy-Nagy asked to shift from pigment to light in the arts; it was when electricity and electrical light found their way into society. The new technical possibilities led to intensified studies of the properties of light in industry and technology, sciences, and the arts.
From the Bauhaus to the artists’ network such as “Light and Space”, DIMENSIO in Finland, GRAV in France and Latin America, Gruppo N and Gruppo T in Italy, ZERO in Europe, a.o., a broad array of artistic research and experimentation altered the canon of the visual arts with new approaches including new materials and technical devices featuring kinetic, optical, performative, and relational aspects. They all organized themselves outside the established art contexts.
The spawning of digital media displays in the middle of the 20th century, spreading backlit screens and projected imageries, sparked another momentum for the reflected application of light in the arts. New art forms emerged along the digital shift, ranging from Generative Art to Augmented Realities. They have changed the canon of visual art.
From pigment to light: László Moholy-Nagy
In his essay “Light: A Medium of Plastic Expression”, published in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) postulated the research of light as a condition for the art based on a transdisciplinary approach on “Painting, Photography, Film” . He developed the idea of learning from photography to explore light as a medium of artistic expression: “Since the discovery of photography, virtually nothing new has been found as far as the principles and technique of the process are concerned. … One way of exploring this field is to investigate and apply various chemical mixtures that produce light effects invisible to the eye (such as electro-magnetic rays and x-rays) … Another way is by the construction of new apparatus, first using the camera obscura; second by the elimination of perspective. In the first case, an apparatus with lenses and mirror arrangements can cover the environment from all sides; in the second case, an apparatus based on new optical laws is used. This last leads to the possibility of “light-composition”, whereby light would be controlled as a new plastic medium, just as color in painting and tone in music.” . He tried to include his ideas in the Bauhaus curriculum but without success.
In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy was invited by the Association of Arts and Industries to become the director of the New Bauhaus: American School of Design. In 1939, the New Bauhaus closed, and Moholy-Nagy founded the ‘School of Design’ – which still exists today as the ‘Institute of Design’ at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Hungarian-born painter and fellow exile Gyorgy Kepes (1906–2001) had been part of Moholy-Nagy’s post-Bauhaus studio in Berlin and London before joining him in Chicago. Jointly, they furthered the idea around the ‘light lab’. In 1967, Gyorgy moved on to Boston.us where he founded the ‘Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS)’ at the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’, continuing research and praxis on light as a creative tool.
Understanding the visual system: Otto Steinert
Briefly after World War II, in 1947, Otto Steinert (1915–1978) had founded a studio for artistic photography, and in 1948 he began teaching at the Saarland State School of Arts and Crafts, becoming its director in 1952. In 1949 he was part of the founding collective of ‘fotoform’. “Those commonplace and merely beautiful pictures, which thrive mainly thanks to the charm of some actual object, are thrust into the background in favor of experiments and fresh solutions. Adventures into the realm of optics are still for the most part unpopular. But only that photography which enlists the help of the experimental will be able to lay bare all the technical formation of the visual experience in our times.“, he stated when talking about artistic photography.
Through photographic experiments, by cropping, by sharp contrasts, and by choosing extreme perspectives, the photographers of ‘fotoform’ focused on the graphic properties of black-and-white photography. Their artistic strategies included photomontage, photogram, solarization, negative printing, and luminogram. Technical experimentation was as important as the commitment to non-figurative abstraction questioning venturing into serial, rhythmical, kinetic, and perceptual modes. ‘Subjective Photography’ was part of an international aspiration of artists from Europe and the US, from Japan and from South America to transform and redefine art in the aftermath of World War II.
Exploring situations: Maria Nordmann
“My works from the start seek the person and the constants of the luminosity, the colors of the atmosphere, as part of the production of meaning of what could become a community together with the whole functioning of nature.” Maria Nordmann is a California-based, German-born artist who works on drawings, objects, environments, films, and language-based works. She is known as one of the visionary artists emerging in the 1960s/1970s, focusing on experience and the ‘co-authorial role’ of the viewers. Her work creates an experiential framework through chance, environment, and time.
Dismantling the pictorial: Robert Irwin
“I started as a painter”, said Robert Irwin (*1928) in an interview in 2015, “but (I) realized early in my career that I had to do what I call a “phenomenological reduction”: slowly, step by step, dismantling the whole idea of pictorial art. That’s been the thrust of modern art, a process so many artists have been involved in … ?” Irwin moved from abstract painting to minimalism before he started to work on sculpture, installation, and intervention.
Distrust in all norms: ZERO
“I have lived in a time of war, in the Nazi era, with its ideologies that dictated what was right and what was wrong. Since then, I have had a deep mistrust of all norms… And that is why I have also turned my statements in my pictures … upside down, upside down through optical lenses: You can see it this way, and you can see it that way.”, recalled artist Mary Bauermeister (*1934), who had left Germany in the early 1960s for New York. She composed layers of glass, embedded lenses, and prisms in geometrical shapes to guide the viewer to multiple perspectives. Later she applied the same principles to drawings, paintings, reliefs, and installations. “Paintings and Constructions” was the title of her first solo exhibition at the Bonino Gallery in New York City in March 1964, where the first lens boxes were presented.
She had hosted the ”Atelier Bauermeister” in Cologne, a series of events that later became the origins of the FLUXUS movement. Otto Piene installed his “Lichtballett” for the first gathering. “Otto Piene was a researcher. He explored colors, observed burning processes, and studied air motions. His drive was curiosity, life-long.” , artist Mary Bauermeister (*1934) recalled Otto Piene (1928-2014) in an interview with Christine Hoffmans. For years, ‘Atelier Bauermeister’ became a place of encounter and exchange, artistic action, and experimentation. The artists were Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, and Otto Piene. Rooted in vibration and structure, energy and light, the ZERO artists’ artistic experimentation led to innovative artistic experimentations, spectacular environments, and legendary actions. “… in a certain way, Zero happened out of a spirit of resistance to the growing new materialism and with a hope that a new spirit, a new beginning, would create a new era of thinking, feeling, and living. At that time, the common understanding was that material welfare would produce human happiness. And I was against that. On the other hand, I was dismayed that the arts seemed to cling to the negativism of the war and postwar period. We were given a kind of ”ruins sentimentality.” , Piene described the mindset looking back on the early years of ZERO. Piene later became the successor of Gyorgy Kepes at the CAVS/MIT in Boston.
Rendering of light: Heinz Mack
“I am a friend of logical working steps, or perhaps I should say, of artistic logic – and I make sure that this logic simultaneously contains elements of chance, its dialectical shadow. I love the invoice whose sum is irrational.” , Heinz Mack (*1931) adheres strictly to the geometries of light. Lines, surfaces, layers and cuts, axes and compositions are designed to stage the performativity of light. From the material selection to the object’s composition to its position in space, their works record the light situation found onsite and transform it into a visual composition. Surfaces, structures, and edges become graphic material; the optical properties of light in interaction with the applied materials, such as brilliance or transparency, bundling or refraction, and reflection or absorption, turn out to be the pictorial material. They do not depict but form a framework that generates an aesthetic situation.
Working with physical light: Mary Corse
“I was able to put light in the painting, not just make a picture of light,” Mary Corse (*1945) recalled. In 1968, she observed reflective road markings and realized she could use the same glass microspheres used in highway paint. Incorporating the prismatic material in her paintings she has created abstract color fields that generate different impressions depending on the spatial light situation and viewing perspective. “I actually use glass microspheres, or prisms that forge a triangular relationship between the painting’s surface, the light and the viewer. And at the middle of this is the viewer’s perception, which animates the work as they move and shift; so in that way, the art is really not on the wall at all, it’s in their perception.” , the artist explained. Like Heinz Mack, Mary Corse works mainly without additional light sources, Helen Pashgian (*1934) is another artist with a comparable approach. Since the 1960s to date – independently of each other – they have been experimenting with optical properties of technical materials.
Working with light: Nan Hoover
„But when I started with video, it was really the fascination of being able to work with light, and no longer with the surrogates of light. For me, video means light …“ stated Nan Hoover (1931–2008). Hoover’s artwork span from drawing, painting, to sculpture and object, to photography and film. She gained international recognition with her explorations of light and digital media display. „I simply started with the specific circumstances: With my body I did performances on the street, where I also included movement and light. I then used video technology as an experiment for light and movement, to work in solitude, in my studio, and there I only made things for video. I never linked these two levels because I think they both have their own contextual qualities. What interested me in both was breaking the isolation that happens in painting by letting things develop as they come – I never used scripts, for example. Nevertheless, I have always approached both like a drawing or a painting: working with the materials, with light, and then developing everything out of them.“
Tracing the environment: Helen Pashgian
“It is all about what these pieces teach you to receive about the surroundings.” , Pashgian considers her works a way to explore a space and a moment in time. Helen Pashgian (*1934) develops translucent objects such as discs, columns, or spheres made of polyester resins that house other objects in their indeterminable interior. Depending on the light situation, a changing interplay of light and shadow, colors, and shapes, inside and outside, reflection and absorption is created.
Platforms of occurrences: Carlos Cruz-Diez
“I don’t make paintings, nor sculptures. I make platforms for occurrences. They are platforms where color is being produced, dissolved, generated in a perpetual instant. In it there’s no notion of past nor future. In it is the notion of the present moment, just like life.” , stated Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923-2019) in an interview in 2017. The Venezuela-born, France-based artist worked on immersive paintings and installations that set color in motion, stirring bodily sensations in the viewer. His signature works are immersive labyrinths of colored light that he called ‘chromatic situations’.
Since the 1960s he had lived in Paris where he was in touch with Julio le Parc and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). The productive network of artists (1960-1968) included Victor Vasarely (1908-97) and his son Jean-Pierre Yvaral (1934-2002), Horacio Garcia-Rossi (1929-2012), François Morellet (1926-2016), Francisco Sobrino (1932-2014) und Jöel Stein (1926-2012), and to some extend Vera Molnár (*1924). In their manifests “Assez de Mythification”, they stated in 1963: ” We think of the viewer as a being who is capable of reacting. Capable of reacting with normal faculties of perception. This is our path.”
Setting space in motion: Gianni Colombo
“I’ve always said that my works have the character of a self-test. They weren’t made to obtain information, but to emancipate the viewer from his state of perception, making him aware of what concerned him,” Gianni Colombo (1937-1993) is cited in an interview with Jole De Sanna published posthumously in 1995. He was part of the last-minute addition to the Documenta 1964, the hall “Light and Movement”, among other seminal exhibitions since the 1960s.
His signature series of works is ‘elastic spaces’ was awarded the Grand Prize of the Venice Biennale of 1968. He developed geometrical drawings in uv-lit spaces, made of elastic strings, moved by mechanical motors. The elastic grid moved through the electromechanical action of motors installed outside the environment. Addressing several points of the reticulation, they engender a slow-moving cycle of stretch and release with each access point programmed differently. The variating flow of stretch and release continuously deformed the spatial net drawn in space.
The viewer positioned inside the ‘spazio-elastico’ immersed in an ever-changing outline of space leading to a constant shifting in perception between line and volume, emptiness and fullness, visibility, and non-visibility. Gianni Colombo works have been described as environments, situations, structures, itineraries, or passages. He built apparatuses that worked autonomously, establishing their own set of rules: perceptive machines, interchangeable sculptures, force fields. The predominance of the performative over the representative character is at the core of his artistic praxis.
Walk-in works: Jesús Rafael Soto
“The viewer becomes an integral part of the work. Heretofore, the viewer was in the position of an external observer of reality. Today, the notion that there is mankind on one side and the world on the other has been superseded. We are not observers but constituent parts of a reality that we know to be teeming with living forces, many of them invisible. We exist in the world like fish in water: not detached from matter-energy; INSIDE, not IN FRONT OF; no longer viewers, but participants.” , explained Jesús Rafael Soto (1923 – 2005) when presenting his series of “Penetrables”. In 1967, Soto debuted artworks made of myriads suspended polymer or metal threads playing with light and shadow, opacity and translucency, color, and shape. Viewers were asked to circulate through thus becoming integral to the work.
Perceptual experience: Julio Le Parc
“Participation was the beginning of the analysis with my friends, Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet and others, but there was someone who did not participate at all: the public who came to an exhibition, without making too much noise, only to receive things, but without any power. We began to do tests to find out if it was true that the public was unable to understand the art of its time. Our preoccupation from the start was the eye of the person looking, to have visual optical resonances. If we corrected the parameters a little, is the work more or less visual; does it produce more or less an optical reaction in the person looking at it? We started with the experience of the person looking and then, from there, participation was solicited little by little with other experiences until it was an active and reflexive participation. We realized that the public was very capable of appreciating what was currently being done or refusing the proposal. They looked and thought things over.” Throughout the decades, Le Parc’s wide-ranging work has spanned paintings on canvas, sculptures, works on paper and even virtual reality, as he now embraces digital art.
Please touch: Grazia Varisco
“Please Touch” was written on the wall of Gruppo T’s first exhibitions. It has the value of an invitation to direct experience, perceived through the sense of touch, which, guided by the mind, takes, detaches, moves the magnetized elements ,and compares opposites, such as order/disorder, outside/inside, before/after and during. “The dimension of time acts on the public in the use of the work, in relation to Space, involving it in direct experimentation, in the intuition of concepts at the base of the research of Gruppo T, with which I shared years of studies and activities.” stated Grazia Varisco (*1937) in an interview with Marco Arrigoni in 2020. The Italian artist developed her artistic research as a member of Gruppo T (referencing: Time) since 1960. Gruppo T was founded in October 1959 in Milan by Giovanni Anceschi (*1939), Davide Boriani (*1936), Gianni Colombo (1937-1993), Gabriele Devecchi (1928-2011). Grazia Varisco joint shortly after and participated in the exhibition series ‘Miriorama’ (en: myriad visions).
Gruppo T focused on kinetic and programmed objects to be manipulated by the user whether manually or mechanically – staging the perceptual instability and the persistence of images on the retina. In retrospect, Milan-based Gruppo T , jointly with the Paduan Gruppo N, pathed the way for the development of computer-based art from 1962 on. In 1964, they joined the Biennial of Venice.it, in the 1965 the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.us, and in 1966 the exhibition “LichtKunstLicht” at the Vanabbe-Museum in Eindhoven.nl The last works signed collectively, date from 1968.
Being involved: Shirazeh Houshiary
“When you’re involved with a visual experience, you will experiment with very different tools, and each tool allows you to discover a new vocabulary. Because the tool is new, it gives you a new vision and revitalizes the process.“ , explained Shirazeh Houshiary (*1955) in 2018. Houshiary’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, video-based installations, and virtual reality settings. “I was studying the quantum world, and how tiny electron quads are affected by a beam of light, completely distorted and affected by a field. We don’t even realize that our body is affected by a powerful field of energy all over the world. You’re sitting here before me but you’re nothing but energy, and I’m nothing but energy. Even our minds are energy. My paintings have that dimension: creating a field in the vision of the viewer. … People can take whatever they need out of it. They don’t have to necessarily understand what I’m trying to get at, but it’s a reflection of them. I become a mirror for them to see themselves and find their own way through this conundrum of “I am” and “I am not” – of the polarity of our existence.“
Staging color as the experience of light: Liz West
“It’s about being a sensory person in a world that is super sensory.” , said Liz West (*1985) in an interview with Paul Nulty. “My interest and research into the science of light and colour is ongoing and has been integral to all my works in the last couple of years, even the work I made on my degree was steeped in rich colour mixing and awareness.” , she recalled when presenting her work “An Additive Mix” at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford (uk) during the UNESCO International Year of Light 2015. It is a purpose-built space consisting of a roof of hundreds of fluorescent tubes covered with color filter sleeves juxtaposed with a mirror covering entirely the floor. The tubes are saturated in individual hues that collectively create an intense white glow. The seemingly endless space provided an intriguing experience based on the principles of additive color mixing. “I think it will be rare for most people to have been completely immersed, saturated, in light produced by so many strong visible colours, and will find it an extraordinary experiential encounter. This work allows people to stop, think and feel.”
Limit of Matter: Ann Veronica Janssens
“I am really interested in this limit state of matter”1 , said Ann Veronica Janssens (*1956) in an interview with Christian Lund in 2020. Recurring materials in her works are transparent surfaces, aerosols, and colored lights: “My use of light to infiltrate matter and architecture is undertaken with a view to provoking a perceptual experience wherein this materiality is made unstable, its resistance dissolved. This movement is often provoked by the brain itself.” 2 She has been part of both large-scale exhibitions dedicated to light as artistic material in 2013, “Dynamo: A Century of Light and Movement in Art, 1913–2013” at the Grand Palais in Paris (fr) , and the “Light Show” at the Hayward Gallery in London (uk). “I use materials which are untouchable and explore loss of control and disorientation. Often my works are ephemeral sculptures, dispersions, without the imposition of a fixed form.” 3
Dedicated to invisible forces: Žilvinas Kempinas
“I am following my interest in movement, in the ideas of how we can transform energy, how we can transform space, how we can use light, how one can manipulate people’s perception with a few basic elements, how to provoke certain feelings, how to balance, how to create a situation for random things to occur – all of these things matter.” , explained Žilvinas Kempinas (*1969). His artistic practice is dedicated to energy, vibration, and structure focusing on invisible forces like light, wind, or sound. Trembling, flickering, floating – beguiling the eye and provoking dizziness ¬– undermine the balance of senses and the habits of conscious.
Image beyond Screen: Anthony McCall
“Drawing is at the center of my working process and, in fact, once a solid light work is realized as an installed work, drawing remains at the center, in the form of the line-drawing – the ‘footprint’ – that the projector casts on to the opposite wall.” New York-based Anthony McCall is known for the ‘solid-light’ interventions. It is a series that started in 1973 with animated 2d drawing projected into a hazed space eliciting 3d volume, tilted ‘A Line Describing a Cone’. “I confess that I have begun to use the word ‘film’ in a very loose way. By ‘film’ I just mean ‘projected work of art’; I no longer mean ‘the medium of film’. I know that this can be misleading, but I like the word because it is just so simple, and it also implies that there is an explicit durational structure, which is absent from the word ‘installation’, for instance.” , shared Anthony McCall with Hans Ulrich Obrist during a studio visit in 2007. “Once I am certain of the shape of a work, I will write this up as ‘instruction drawings’ for my programmer. These are essentially notes and diagrams full of the essential details about what happens in the line drawings and how those lines move and change over time. Remember, the programmer only needs to know about what happens on the screen: the volumetric, sculptural aspects of a piece occur only at the moment of projection. This is when the haze in the air reveals the three-dimensional extension of the lines on the wall.”
Into the ephemeral: Joan Brigham
“In steam the film reaches the ultimate point of dematerialization. The audience is able physically to enter the image and the cloud and become wrapped in a wholly new experience: the size of the droplets maintains the clarity of the image while at the same time extending it laterally into space. Infinite repeatability subject to the winds of chance.” , stated Joan Brigham (*1935). Although she never focused on working with the application of light as part of her practice, she was close to the artists working with light. Over centuries she co-operated frequently with artists like Otto Piene and Stan VanDenBeek. In tandem with Stan VanDenBeek, she realized the first “Steam Screens” in 1975/6 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in Boston.us. In 1977, she was part of the artistic collective of the “Centerbeam”-Project at the Documenta 6 in Kassel: “Steam works are events … in which a single view of reality is unintended.” To date, she is focused on aerosols in combination with transparent materials like glass or acryl in her artistic practice: “The realities of each moment are in flux, contradictory, insistent and elegant. As the steam changes the audience, the audience changes the steam”.
Sensing progress: Stephen Antonakos
“Many people have mentioned, specifically now that I am working very close to the wall, it is almost like painting. I suppose it is like painting except it is a little more in dimension. Also, we must remember that not only does it flow on the wall itself, but it affects the opposite walls.” , described Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013) his neon-based works in 1975. His artwork has been included in the path-making exhibition “Licht Kunst Licht” at the Vanabbe Museum in Eindhoven.nl in 1966, the Documenta 1977 in Kassel.de, and the Venice Biennial in 1997. “Toward the end of the 1960s, I was very interested in making large neon works that defined or redefined space … Later … I did the “Walk-On Neon”, which consisted of a nine-by-twelve-foot glass floor with straight and curved horizontal neon lines underneath and tall bands shooting up through the center of the room.” , recalls Antonakos.
He was among the artists like Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Mario Merz (1925-2003), François Morellet (1926-2016), Chryssa (1933-2013), Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Maurizio Nannucci (*1939), Jan van Munster (*1939), Keith Sonnier (1941-2020), Lili Kakich (*1944), Josef Kosuth (*1945) that turned neon into artists’ material. The properties of the noble gas argon, krypton, neon, and xenon had been discovered at the end of the 19th century, neon tubes as advertising signs were introduced in the beginning of the 20th century, instantly very successful. The “electro-graphic architecture” started to transform cityscape. The radiance of the neon signs echoed the idea of a “century of progress”. Artists started to experiment and paved the way for new forms of artistic expression interweaving light, color, and space applying handmade and manufactured lighting tools.
Responding to technology advances: Frank Malina
“I was very interested in the possible relationships between art, science and technology. I used to complain that when I went to the museums, I kept seeing paintings of dead fish and nudes and flowers and so forth, and no one seemed to be interested in all these other things that are happening in science and technology – the products and the conceptions and all these things. I had that bee in my bonnet. So, I was trying to find a way to introduce this into the visual arts. This led me, then, to start working with light and kinetic art.” In 1950s, Frank Malina (1912-1981) abandoned pigments and brushes to work on mechanical systems interacting with canvases. He choreographed with light, light-responding materials, and optical phenomena exploring serial aspects, repetition, and movement.
From 1956 to 1966 he developed more than 100 light- and movement-based works, which he described as “lumidyne systems”. “In his way of combining scientific and artistic views of the world as well as in his concern to use industrial or technical processes in the development of design and art, he was anchored in the tradition of the Bauhaus. I remember my father, when he was struggling to exhibit his kinetic art in Parisian galleries and museums, joking that there was more technology in his kitchen than in the best museum in Paris.” , remembered Roger Malina, Frank Malina’s son.
Holographic pioneering: Dieter Jung
“I don’t paint with pigments anymore, I paint with photons” , said Dieter Jung (*1941) introducing his retrospective at the ZKM (de: Zentrum für Kunst und Medien / en: Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe in 2019. The exhibition reflected Jung’s dedication to holography in perpetual dialog with drawing, printmaking, painting, kinetic motion, and digital animation. Since the 1970s, his artistic praxis has been committed to the interaction of perspective and color, space and light, surface, and structure in the form of holograms, holographic mobiles, and holographic light spaces. “The pureness of color in holography is outstanding and can’t be reached in any other medium” , he stated in an interview in 2013. “Holography hasn’t been invented for the arts, but if offered a potential that has been fathomed in its esthetic breadth and depth, jointly by artists and scientists.”
From 1985 to 1988, he was fellow at Center of Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, under the aegis of Otto Piene. Here he developed the first “LightMills”, computer-generated holograms in motion. “That later some of the Center (CAVS) artists were asked to advise the founding of the Media Art Academy in Cologne and the ZKM Karlsruhe, pleases me to date.” “Holographic Network” hosted at the University of the Arts in Berlin in 1996 from New York Dan Schweitzer (1946-2001), one of the participating artists who joined the international conference, started his lecture at the conference explaining the crucial role of light for holography: “My fascination for holography stems from my attraction to the light and the ability to “sculpt” this energy. Light, it seems to me, is the most effective medium to use when attempting to visualize an idea. Ideas themselves seem to be composed of light. It is the metaphorical behavior of light that compels me to record it as signposts in my travel to examine thought, reality, and our perception of them.”
Transdisciplinary cooperation: Katie Paterson
“I’ve undertaken artist residencies in scientific institutes – University College London Astrophysics; the Sanger Institute in Cambridge and worked with cosmologists at CALTECH, W.M Keck Observatory; NASA, and recently the European Space Agency. I’ve worked with lighting engineers, geographers, geologists, perfumers, biochemists, technologists, biologists, horologists, foresters, paleontologists and others. These interactions are always unique and in relation to the idea at hand.” , said Katie Paterson (*1981). She is to make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise in works like ‘Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight’ (2008), ‘All Dead Stars’ (2009), ‘History of Darkness’ (2010), ‘100 Billion Suns’ (2011) to ‘Totality’ (2016) or ‘A Space That Only Exists in Moonlight’ (2019). Her works often start off as poetic ideas before they turn into scientific undertakings resulting in objects and installations ‘made of knowledge’. As over the centuries from Ibn Al Haytham to Albert Einstein, from Marie Curie to Donna Strickland, the study of light and its properties have revolutionized every field of science, it is a constant in the Paterson’s work.
Expanding the scope: Nicolas Schoeffer
“ … what is decisive is the interior, the air, the space, the light. There is only a minimum of structure. I am an advocate of materials that are as immaterial as possible.” , Nicolas Schoeffer (1912–1992) answered when asked if the light tower he planned for Paris will be made of steel. His second book, “La ville cybernétique (The Cybernetic City)” was released in 1969. In an interview with the French news magazine L’Express in 1970, he explained his idea: “It will be 322 meters high and will be placed in the “Défense” square. It will be a scaffold with 260 mirrors mounted on 114 axes, between 200 parallel arms; the rotation speeds will be different. Inside the scaffolding, 3000 spotlights will be installed behind windows in groups of ten. There will also be “light cannons”, some of them at the top, which will throw their beams two to three kilometers into the sky. More than 2000 electron flashes are partly programmed directly by computers. In addition, a couple of smoke cannons are distributed everywhere. The function of the tower will be to reflect both the immediate and the distant urban environment; in other words, it will receive all the information about the activities of the city of Paris. This information will be presented in a constantly fluctuating curve that will indicate, perhaps for the first time in the history of a city, the degree of its activity and relaxation. All this will be transformed into aesthetic actions with the help of computers: The programming will cause changes in color, rhythm, and speed.”
Working with LED screens
In 2002, Villareal presented his first fully formed LED sculpture, Jim Campbell focused on low-resolution screens, Erwin Redl featured walk-in spaces filled with radiant matrixes. Squidsoup’s approach can be traced in these guiding interests of these pioneers working with luminous pixel grids. Over the last decades, their artistic position has been furthered with stand-alone qualities.
The three path makers worked on scaled-up image systems to explore underlying structures and dynamics that govern their way of working. They featured the pixel as smallest unit a digital image is made of; they developed mechanisms and wrote programs to control the image dots; they used light as the medium of rendering visuals on screens. The technical advancement of the LED, its smallness — its digital controllability, and its availability — nurtured these artistic approaches. The resulting forms and formats move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms reinventing the interplays of physical components, of spatial extent and of temporal resolution.
Experimental displays: Jim Campbell
“I made my first electronic artworks in 1988 and from the beginning I saw electronic art as way of merging my engineering skills with my background in in film and photography” , recalls Jim Campbell (*1956). He had studied mathematics and engineering at the Massachusetts Institut of Technology (MIT) in the late 1970s and has since worked in filmmaking, interactive video and LED light technology. His background in electrical engineering, mathematics, photography, and filmmaking enables him to make immersive works that explore the space between the representative and the abstract. He started in the 1980s to experiment with LED Screens with individually controllable pixels. Instead of displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, he inverted the process and features low-res screens: “Drastically reducing the details of a moving image allows the viewer to experience a simpler form of perception. In the more successful works this process bypasses the more analytical parts of the brain leaving room for a more “primal” perception of an image that is more felt than seen. This has really been what is at the core of my work for many years now.”
He explicitly features the entanglement of perception, screen, and content: “Many of my works start out as perceptual experiments or questions …”, he said, “I have an idea for a mediated digital display and don’t know what the end result will be and that becomes the reason to make the work. The more unpredictable a finished work is, the more driven I am to finish it. Almost as important to the end result of a new experimental display is the preservation and development of mistakes. During the process of creating the technology many mistakes are made and I often run with these mistakes as they lead to a work that feels freer than a work that stuck to the preconceived notions that I started with.”
Like Leo Villareal: Experimenting with hardware and software
“I graduated from college in 1990, the same year Adobe Photoshop was launched. There was also a lot of buzz about virtual reality even then. These new tools intrigued me and led me to the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU where I deeply immersed myself in all sorts of tech. I always knew I wanted to use these tools as an artist. It took me many years to find my medium. In 1997 I connected software and light for the first time. I created a beacon with 16 strobe lights that I programmed with a basic stamp microcontroller. Zero was off and one was on. What started as a simple wayfinding device turned out to be a major epiphany. The combination of software, light and space crystalized into what then became my medium.” , Leo Villareal (*1967) recalls how he started in get involved with the technology: He started in 1997 working on luminous sculptures. He experimented with LEDs systems to create complex, rhythmic artworks for both gallery and public settings. In 2002, Villareal presented his first fully formed LED sculpture, “Hexad” at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth/FL.us demonstrating early experimentation with complex patterns, layering combinations of colors, and light intensity. In 2003, he produced his first large-scale architectural work, “Supercluster” for the group exhibition Signatures of the Invisible at MoMA P.S. 1, New York, in collaboration with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva.
Featuring the digital experience: Erwin Redl
“Since 1997”, Erwin Redl stated in an interview. “I have investigated the process of “reverse engineering” by (re-)translating the abstract aesthetic language of virtual reality and 3‑D computer modeling back into architectural environments by means of large-scale light installations. In this body of work, space is experienced as a second skin, our social skin, which is transformed through my artistic intervention.” Austrian Erwin Redl (*1963) started a series of works titled “Matrix” in 2002 designing a 3d matrix made of a net of individually controllable LEDs to fill a space. He applied similar approaches to tube structures named “Flow” from 2010 on, and a series of outdoor projects with hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a programmed, white LED light, suspended from a square grid of steel poles and cabling. “Whiteout” was first installed at Madison Square Park, NYC. He features the experienceable dimension of the digital sphere, “… equally, the various interactions between the visitors within the context of the installation re-shape each viewer’s subjective references and reveal a complex social phenomenon.”
Furthering Op-Art: Peter Kogler
Peter Kogler’s signature works are immersive spatial interventions. Applying drawing, painting, printing, and projection he builds psychedelic capsules shifting space from straight to twisted or warped, distorting appearance and perception. His immersive spatial interventions alter the visitor’s perspective of architecture. He has transformed galleries, museums, universities, and transit spaces whether it is a hotel lobby or a train station, in Op-Art works. Interviewed by Kathrin Rhomberg in 2000, he recalled: “The motifs often resulted from drawings. I made an intuitive decision to use them. My first work using ants was a Super 8 film that I shot in Italy in a garden belonging to some friends. I always used to carry a camera around with me. The ant ran across the newspaper by chance and I just followed it with the camera. The film was not originally intended to be an autonomous work. Only when I thought about it afterwards did it cease to be merely an ant; it was an ant on a newspaper page, in other words an ant in relationship to a semiotic system.“ In 1999, he started to work with stage and architecture projections: “But what happens in projections … is that they take over your whole field of orientation. Like a huge lift that suddenly plummets to the ground, or a house that begins to rotate. A lot of people actually sat down on the floor to allow the projections to take their full effect. That is perhaps where the psychedelic impression … actually came from.“
Including projection mapping: Klaus Obermaier
“I studied painting, visual arts, I had an experience as a graphic designer, and I studied music as well.”, Klaus Obermaier (*1955) introduced himself. “…when I start doing my art, there were no computers around. So, these two parts, visual arts and music, were rather separate things. But, when computers became available, I immediately start to mix. So, I started to work with video and cameras, and I started to integrate them into action. It happened, like so many times, by accident. I met people who worked with this equipment, we got together, and we put up a project that was highly interactive. I start to do programming a little bit, and in the end, it was like a natural process” In the early years, easy access and handling of the digital media equipment was helpful: “Digital video was something I could do by myself. I could cut it on the computer, borrow some cameras… so it was possible. The use of other things, such as interactive laser – a very sophisticated thing that connects videos, music, lasers, and body movement – happened more or less at the same time. This droves me totally into it. I had the possibility to work more with interactive media, again, with different people. … But I am … the creator, I am the choreographer, I am the composer, and also the media artist, stage designer, etc. … After I finished my studies in music and visual arts, I realized that I was interested in time-based art, something that is going over time in order to get you into something.” Since 1995, Vienna-based Klaus Obermaier is performing as media-artist, director, choreographer, and composer. He developed innovative work in the area of performing arts, music, theater and new media.
Inspired by virtual reality: Jennifer Steinkamp
“My work is inspired by the tools and the ideology of virtual reality. I investigate our experiential relationship to architectural space, real and imagined as it is experienced through time. Virtual or representational space is combined with real space, and the two transform each other: real space is dematerialized through animation, while the virtual space of the 3-D animation is corporealized through architecture, creating a sort of dreamlike experiential space, or altered state.” , Jennifer Steinkamp told the curator Rochelle Steiner when part taking in the exhibition “Wonderland” at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2000. “It’s a lot of work to keep up with all the changes and advancements in technology. I do a lot of research, but at the same time, that is not the point of my work. I am really intrigued by advances in technology but only in the light of creating and transforming space and experience.”
Composing with all media: Ryoji Ikeda
“I compose visual elements, sounds, colors, intensities, and data … I love to compose; I love to orchestrate all these things into one single art form – sometimes as a concert, sometimes as an installation, sometimes as public art, sometimes as film.” , Ryoji Ikeda explains. The artistic pathway of Paris-based, Japan-born Ryoji Ikeda (*1966) is rooted in the advancement of the digital shift. When sound and image where digitized, he started to explore the potential of interaction, and his works are made off sine waves and sound impulses, light pixels, and image fragments to create dynamic data, number and image systems that reformat audiovisual correspondence. He is performing and exhibiting frequently and internationally for more than two decades.
The primary medium: Michel Verjux
“Light is one of the few and interesting media that a contemporary artist can work with.” , Michel Verjux (*1956) is known for concrete, in-situ works that consist of projections of geometrical shapes interacting with a selected projection ground re-forming the shape of the bundled and framed white light. “The principal idea is that space needs light that it can react to it.” Verjux has been exhibiting extensively since 1983, mainly around Europe. With minimal means, he composes visual situations where the applied light and what it renders visible, where the viewer’s position in space and the echo of the visual apparatus generates esthetical coordinates that are inciting senses and thought. “To illuminate is mainly to make appear; it is to make pass from non-visibility to visibility.” , he explained in an interview during his exhibition in the Louvre in 2007. In the 1980s, he moved from the variety of practices that he described as “mixed media collages” to light as the essential medium. In an interview in 2011 at the occasion of his exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, he said: “All artists – painters, sculptors, photographers and video artists – need light.” .
Preliminary Endnote
Whether artists are exploring line, color, shape, and form, space, time, and motion, or sight and perception, at one point, they arrive at light as a material or medium to be included in artistic reflection and concept, impartially, whether they are working in the analog or digital sphere. This collection of traces can feed a mind map to formulate questions of analysis and inquisitive perspectives to follow up the developments of natural, technical, and digital transformation of light, rendering visible the world. It is an open collection and resorted at times to explore various ways to cluster and link artistic approaches reflecting upon the properties of light and their use, the technologies of light and their applications, and the design of light and its impact rendering visible the world.
In photography and film, on stage and screens, for installations and interventions, in drawing and painting, artistic praxis about light as material and medium challenges the canon of the arts by abandoning art’s historical conventions and exceeding the art world’s standards. The artistic research and praxis that show a shift from pigment to light, from canvas to environment, from permanent to the performative, from object to perception, from physical to virtual, and from passive to an active audience cannot be summarized under the term ‘light art,’ it is instead research and studies that thematize the light-centered aspect.