Bettina Pelz: Shifting Focus

Whether artists are exploring line, color, shape, and form or space, time, and motion or sight and perception, at one point they arrive to light as material or medium to be included in artistic reflection and concept, impartially if they are working in the analog or the digital sphere. This is a collection of traces that 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 collection¹ and resorted at times to explore various ways of how to cluster and to link artistic approaches reflection upon the properties of light and their use, the technologies of light and their applications, the design of light and its impact rendering visible the world.

When 100 years ago, László Moholy-Nagy asked to shift from pigment to light in the arts, it was the time 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, in sciences, and in the arts. From the Bauhaus to the artists’ network such as “Light and Space”, ZERO in Europe, GRAV in France and Latin America, Gruppo T in Italy 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.

The spawning of digital media displays in the middle of the 20th century spreading backlit screens and projected imageries sparked another momentum of the experimental application of light in the arts. Along the digital shift emerged new art forms ranging from Generative Art to Augmented Realities. Today contemporary artistic experimentation enrolls around a trifold perspective on light as the medium of appearance of the analog world, as the medium of display of digital imageries, and as the medium of visual perception.

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”². He developed the idea to learn 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 which produce light effects imperceptible 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 using apparatus with lenses and mirror arrangements which can cover their environment from all sides; in the second case, using an apparatus that is based on new optical laws. 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”³. 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.

Learning from photography: Otto Steinert

“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.“⁴, stated Otto Steinert (1915–1978) when talking about artistic photography.

Briefly after World War II, in 1947, he 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’. 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.

Tracking Technology: 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.”⁵ 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.”⁶

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 cooperated 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 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”⁷.

Applying lighting tools as artistic material: Stephen Antonakos

“Many people have mentioned, specifically now that I am working very close to the wall, it is almost like a 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.”⁸, described Stephen Antonakos’s (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.”⁹, recalls Antonakos.

He was among the artists like Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Mario Merz (1925-2003), Francois 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.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹, remembered Roger Malina, Frank Malina’s son.

Holographic pioneering: Dieter Jung

“I don’t paint with pigments anymore, I paint with photons”¹², 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.”¹³

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.”¹⁴

“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.”¹⁵

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.“¹⁶

From perception to participation: 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.”¹⁷ 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.

Staging color as the experience of light: Liz West

“It’s about being a sensory person in a world that is super sensory.”¹⁸, 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.”¹⁹

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.”²⁰, 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.

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 really been the thrust of modern art, a process so many artists have been involved in … ?”²¹. 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 own statements in my pictures … upside down, upside down through optical lenses: You can see it this way and you can see it that way.”²², 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 are 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 the motions of air. 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.

Among the artists were Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, and Otto Piene. Rooted in vibration and structure, energy and light, the artistic experimentation of the ZERO artists had 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 indeed 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 by the fact 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.

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,”²³stated 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) in 1960. Gruppo T was founded in October 1959 in Milan by Giovanni Anceschi (*1939), Davide Boriani (*1936), Gianni Colombo (1937-1993), and Gabriele Devecchi (1928-2011). Grazia Varisco joined 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., 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.

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,”²⁴, 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’ which was awarded the Grand Prize at 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’ is 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’s 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, and force fields. The predominance of the performative over the representative character is at the core of his artistic praxis.

Tracing the environment: Helen Pashgian

“It is all about what these pieces teach you to receive about the surroundings.”²⁵, Pashgian considers her works a way to explore 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 are created.

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.”²⁶

Limit of Matter: Ann Veronica Janssens

“I am really interested in this limit state of matter”²⁷, 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.”²⁸ 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, 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.”²⁹

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.”³⁰, Ryoji Ikeda explains. The artistic pathway of 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.”³¹, 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.”³² 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 a 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.”

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.”³³, the artist explained.

Working with video: 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, and 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 the 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.“³⁴

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.”³⁵

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.”

Experimenting with hardware and software: Leo Villareal

“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.”³⁶ Since 1995, Vienna-based Klaus Obermaier is performing as a media artist, director, choreographer, and composer. He developed innovative work in the area of performing arts, music, theater and new media.

Disorienting: Peter Kogler

“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.“³⁸ Peter Kogler’s signature works are immersive spatial interventions. In 1999, he started to work with stage and architecture projections. 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, into artworks.

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.”³⁹, 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 intrigued by technological advances but only in the light of creating and transforming space and experience.”

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.”⁴⁰

Preliminary Endnote

The artistic research and praxis that show a shift from pigment to light, from canvas to environment, from permanent to 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 rather research and studies that thematize the light-centered aspect.

This open archive addresses the diversity of artistic research, and praxis on the interaction of apparition, presentation, and experience of artists working with light as an artistic medium. It looks back on exploring the assets of physical light as artistic material and medium since the beginning of the 20th century. Instead of unfolding a timeline, it collects aspects, themes, and concepts that artists have expressed over time referring to light as material and medium. In photography and film, on stage and on screens, for installations and interventions, in drawing and painting, artistic praxis pertaining to light as material and medium still challenges the canon of the arts.

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The starting point of this collection was a lecture at the conference “Light As A Creative Tool” at the Art Academy in Gdansk 2018. Published since 30 March 2021. Latest update on 20 January 2023.

FEATURED IMAGE

Margareta Hesse. GOLDSTUECKE Gelsenkirchen 2022. Photo: Martin Schmuedderich.

LINKS

Art Academy of Gdansk: Light as a Creative Tool (LAACT): Website
LAACT Publication 2018 (Free download)

FOOTNOTES

1
I am happy to receive further proposals and quotes. Please send an email to studio[]bettinapelz.de
2
László Moholy Nagy: Painting, Photography, Film. First English Edition. Lund Humphries London 1969. “Malerei, Fotografie, Film” originally appeared as Volume 8 in the Bauhausbucher series in 1925. The German edition was reissued in 1967 in facsimile in the series Neue Bauhausbucher by Florian Kupferberg Verlag, Mainz. The first English translation is based on the facsimile. URL https://monoskop.org/images/c/cb/Moholy-Nagy_Laszlo_Painting_Photography_Film.pdf >> 17 August 2020.
3
László Moholy-Nagy: Light: A Medium of Plastic Expression. Broom: An International Magazine Of The Arts, Volume 4, Number 4, March 1923. Page 283/284 [PDF]. On: Princeton Blue Mountain Project _ Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research. Princeton University Library 2012-2018. URL http://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn?a=d&d=bmtnaap192303-01.2.16.3 May 2, 2018.
4
Cited after: James Hugunin: Subjective Photography and The Existentialist Ethic. In: Afterimage 1988.
URL https://www.academia.edu/39788779/SUBJECTIVE_PHOTOGRAPHY_AND_THE_EXISTENTIALIST_ETHIC?auto=download >> 8 March 2021.
5
Joe Lyod: Anthony McCall: The sculptural aspect of a piece occurs only at the moment of projection. 14 March 2018.
URL https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/anthony-mccall-solid-light-works-hepworth-wakefield-interview >> 23 February 2020.
6
Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed Anthony McCall in his studio in New York, in December 2007.
URL https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/files/downloads/Anthony%20Mccall%20interview.pdf >> 2 February 2020.
[/nfm], 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.”⁶Joe Lyod: Anthony McCall: The sculptural aspect of a piece occurs only at the moment of projection. 14 March 2018.
URL https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/anthony-mccall-solid-light-works-hepworth-wakefield-interview >> 23 February 2020.
7
Stan VanDenBeek, Joan Brigham: Steam Screens. Whitney Museum of Art. 1979.
URL http://stanvanderbeek.com/_PDF/steamscreens_under%20aquarius_final.pdf >> 22 August 2020
8
Paul Cumming: Oral History Interview with Stephen Antonakos. 9 May 1975. Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
URL https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212217 . Page 41. 12 May 2018.
9
No author given: Stephen Antonakos. On: Artforum.com. September 2012.
URL https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201207/stephen-antonakos-32009 >> 30 August 2020.
10
Mary Terrell: Interview with Frank J. Malina. 14 December 1978. Page 22. On: Archives California Institute of Technology, Pasadena/CA.
URL http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/149/1/Malina.pdf >> 3 March 2020.
11
Roger F. Malina: Kepes and Malina: Some Personal Observations on Theory and Praxis (First Draft). Website Roger Malina. 24 Mai 2010.
Übersetzung: Bettina Pelz mit Unterstützung von deepl.com
URL http://malina.diatrope.com/2010/05/24/kepes-and-malina-some-personal-observations-on-theory-and-praxis-first-draft/, eingesehen am 18. Februar 2019.
12
ZKM Karlsruhe: Dieter Jung | Between and Beyond. On: Youtube.com. 26 April 2019.
URL https://youtu.be/KYo3vWM6K8Q >> 1 September 2020.
13
ZKM Karlsruhe: Holografie am ZKM – Interview mit Dieter Jung. On: Youtube.com. 4 October 2013. Translation: Bettina Pelz.
URL https://youtu.be/Lz_WxohfFK0 >> 1 September 2020.
14
ZKM Karlsruhe: Holografie am ZKM – Interview mit Dieter Jung. On: Youtube.com. 4 October 2013. Translation: Bettina Pelz.
URL https://youtu.be/Lz_WxohfFK0 >> 1 September 2020.
15
Dan Schweitzer: Art in Holography. Presented at the “Holographic Network” Conference in Berlin 1996. On: Center for the Holographic Arts: Dan Schweitzer. No author, no date given.
URL http://holocenter.org/dan-schweitzer >> 1 September 2020.
16
No author given: A Conversation with Shirazeh Houshiary. On: post-ism.com. 24 May 2018.
URL https://post-ism.com/2018/05/24/a-conversation-with-shirazeh-houshiary/ >> 13 August 2020.
17
-Jean Mun-Delsalle: An Interview with Julio Le Parc. 9 July 2019. On: Billionaire (Blog /Zine).
URL https://www.bllnr.com/art-craftmanship/an-interview-with-julio-le-parc`>> 12 August 2020.
18
Paul Nulty: Simplicity, Geometry and Colour. On: Nulty+. 10 April 2019.
URL https://www.nultylighting.co.uk/blog/interview-with-artist-liz-west/ >> 5 September 2020.
19
No author given: Interview with Liz West. On: aesthetica.com. 27 June 2015.
URL https://aestheticamagazine.com/interview-liz-wells-additive-mix-national-media-museum/ >> 5 September 2020.
20
Atelier Soto: About Jesús Rafael Soto. Quoted from: Jean Clay: Les Pénétrables de Soto. Robho No 3. Paris 1968.
URL https://jesus-soto.com/credits/ >> 17 March 2021.
21
Scott Tennent: Conversation with Maria Nordmann. On: LACMA Unframed. 5 April 2012. URL https://unframed.lacma.org/2012/04/05/conversation-with-maria-nordman >> 16 August 2020
22
Susanne Boecker: Mary Bauermeister, Dubio ergo sum. In: Kunstforum 252/2018. Translation: Bettina Pelz.
URL https://www.kunstforum.de/artikel/mary-bauermeister/ >> 8 September 2020.
23
Marco Arrigoni: L’essenza della poesia nelle opere d’arte di Grazia Varisco. On. Harper’s Bazaar Online. 3 July 2020.
URL https://www.harpersbazaar.com/it/lifestyle/arte/a33021078/grazia-varisco-opere/ >> 28 July 2020.
24
Cited after widewall.ch: Gianni Colombo: Spazio elastico. 29 June 2016.
URL https://www.widewalls.ch/auction-artwork/gianni-colombo-spazio-elastico >> 21 March 2020.
25
The Getty Conversation Institute, “Helen Pashgian: Transcending the Material” (Video, 2014), 1. August 2014.
URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHj2vEPuelw >> 14 January 2021.
26
No author given: „Das wird ein unglaubliches Fest“. In: Spiegel 9 February 1970. The SPIEGEL printed an abridged version of an interview Nicolas Schoeffer had done with the French news magazine “L’Express”. Translation: Bettina Pelz.
27
Christian Lund: Ann Veronica Janssens Interview: A Piece of the Sky. 12 May 2020. On: Dezinark.com.
URL https://dezignark.com/blog/ann-veronica-janssens-interview-a-piece-of-the-sky/ >> 3 July 2020.
28
Michel Francois: Interview with Ann Veronica Janssens. 23 Januar 2009. On: Bortolami Gallery Online.
URL https://bortolamigallery.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/AVJ_Interview_2009.pdf >> 2 August 2020.
29
Penny V. Rafferti: Light and Knowledge. 3 March 2015. On: exberliner.com.
URL https://www.exberliner.com/whats-on/art/ann-veronica-janssens-interview/ >> 22 August 2020.
30
Nicolas Forrest: Ryoji Ikeda: Artistic Genius or Maths Magician? Blouinartinfo Australia 28. Juni 2013.
URL http://au.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/922562/ryoji-ikeda-artistic-genius-or-maths-magician#sthash.yhaww4QK.dpuf 1. December 2015.
31
Quin Mathews Films: Interview with Michel Verjux. On: Dallas Contemporary. youtube.com. 15 March 2011.
URL https://youtu.be/CY7byzxZZnw >> 23 August 2020.
32
Quin Mathews Films: Interview with Michel Verjux. On: Dallas Contemporary. youtube.com. 15 March 2011. URL https://youtu.be/CY7byzxZZnw >> 23 August 2020.
33
Nico Wheadon: Seeing Is Believing: An Interview with Mary Corse. 28 July 2015. Published in NOTOFU Magazine, Sommer 2016 Issue. URL http://www.nicowheadon.com/writing/2015/7/28/seeing-is-believing-an-interview-with-mary-corse 12 May 2018.
34
Friedemann Malsch: Nan Hoover: Für mich bedeutet Video Licht. Kunstforum 98/1989. Page 124 to 131. Translation: Bettina Pelz.
URL https://www.kunstforum.de/artikel/fur-mich-bedeutet-video-licht/ >> 20 December 2019.
35
Richard Bright: Expressing to the Unconscious. On: Interalia Magazine Online. July 2017.
URL https://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/jim-campbell/ >> 23 November 2022.
36
Jeff Davis: In conversation with Leo Villareal. On: The Link – Art Blogs. 21 January 2022.
URL https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/in-conversation-with-leo-villareal-e6124977f836 >> 3 January 2023.
³⁶, 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.

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.”³⁷Rodica Mocan: Interview with Klaus Obermaier. 2013.
URL https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323476303_Klaus_Obermaier_My_work_is_not_simply_visualisation_It’s_a_totally_diff_erent_thing >> 27 August 2020.
37
38
Kathrin Rhomberg. Interview with Peter Kogler. 2000. On: kogler.net. No date was given.
URL http://www.kogler.net/essays/peter-kogler-conversation-kathrin-rhomberg >> 27 August 2020.
39
Rochelle Steiner: Jennifer Steinkamp Interview. In: Rochelle Steiner: Wonderland. Saint Louis Art Museum Saint Louis/MI.us 2000. Page 103.
URL https://www.jsteinkamp.com/html/reviews.htm >> 31 August 2020.
40
Erwin Redl: Statement. On: paramedia.net (Artists’ Website). No date given.
URL http://www.paramedia.net/information/statement.php >> 27 December 2022.