The Senses and Society Light Art, Perception, and Sensation (original) (raw)

Reconnecting with darkness: gloomy landscapes, lightless places

Social and Cultural Geograohy, 2013

This paper investigates the effects and affects of darkness, a condition that is progressively becoming less familiar for those of us in the over-illuminated West. In countering the prevailing cultural understanding that darkness is a negative condition, I draw attention to other historical and cultural ways of positively valuing darkness. Subsequently, in drawing on two sites, a gloomy landscape at a dark sky park in South Scotland, and a tourist attraction in which a simulation of New York is experienced in a completely dark environment, I explore the multivalent qualities of darkness. In foregrounding the becoming of sensory experience in gloomy space, I highlight the mobilisation of alternative modes of visual perception in as well as the emergence of non-visual apprehensions, and suggest that the potentialities of darkness might foster progressive forms of conviviality, communication and imagination.

Re-envisioning the Nocturnal Sublime: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Nighttime Lighting

Grounded in the practical problem of light pollution, this paper examines the aesthetic dimensions of urban and natural darkness, and its impact on how we perceive and evaluate nighttime lighting. It is argued that competing notions of the sublime, manifested through artificial illumination and the natural night sky respectively, reinforce a geographical dualism between cities and wilderness. To challenge this spatial differentiation, recent work in urban-focused environmental ethics, as well as environmental aesthetics, are utilized to envision the moral and aesthetic possibilities of a new urban nocturnal sublime. Through articulating the aspirations and constraints of a new urban nocturnal experience, this paper elucidates the axiological dimensions of light pollution, draws attention to nightscapes as a site of importance for urban-focused (environmental) philosophy, and examines the enduring relevance of the sublime for both the design of nighttime illumination and the appreciation of the night sky.

Night walking: darkness and sensory perception in a night-time landscape installation

Cultural Geographies - CULT GEOGR, 2011

Human sensory orders are recalibrated when faced with the reduced illumination levels of the night; it is harder to judge depth and distance, details are obscured, colours muted, and one is obliged to compensate for this loss of visual acuity by drawing on the other senses. Darkness also forces one to question how one’s body is in relation to that which surrounds, challenging one’s human sense of bodily presence and boundary. Focusing on The Storr: Unfolding Landscape, a temporary night-time installation by the environmental arts charity NVA (Nacionale Vite Activa) on the Isle of Skye in 2005, this paper draws together contemporary art theory on installation art and recent post-phenomenological work in geography to explore the ways in which individuals experience the nocturnal landscape. In so doing, the paper highlights the close connections between these two bodies of work and how they might be usefully employed to advance traditional geographical understandings of landscape in art. At the same time, however, it raises both an empirical concern and a methodological question. First, regarding the uncritical way in which visibility is incorporated into many post-phenomenological accounts of landscape. Second, regarding the validity of focussing on isolated narratives in instances such as this when so much of what the individuals experienced was caused by, or shared with, others.

Seeing with light and landscape: a walk around Stanton Moor

Landscape Research

This paper focuses on the much-neglected contribution of light to the conceptualization of landscape. I discuss how light circulates through our visual system and around the spaces we see, refuting notions that we can be detached from the landscapes that we view and characterize. Though we see with the vital light and the landscape, I emphasize that our experiences are invariably entangled with prevalent cultural values, meanings and representations. By drawing upon the experience of walking around an area of raised moorland in the Peak District, I suggest that the experience of particular landscapes can be distinguished by the changing light that radiates upon them and to which we continuously become attuned. By composing an autoethnographic account that highlights key moments when its effects seemed particularly acute, I exemplify the distinctive ways in which the shifting light interacts with elements within this particular landscape

Making sense of darkness. Art, sensation and a particular kind of thought process

Experience can involve sensations that intensify awareness and thought, casting them to a place of oddness, far from what is common, encoded and comfortable ; an intensity thus generated allows for sense to flow in various and different directions. Art deals with these sensations in particular ways. It deviates from the typical modes of sense making and materialises objects, however insubstantial or ephemeral, which encapsulate and conserve those sensations. Yet, for this to occur a process of transmutation must take place. In this article the artistic process is presented as a disembodiment strategy: a certain reality is disengaged from its original context to be reincorporated into another, new entity: the artwork.

'What Lies Beyond the Darkness': Imagining a shared experience of natural environments through heightened human/non-human perception

2018

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

Curating Lights and Shadows, or the Remapping of the Lived Experience of Space

This article investigates the curation and presentation of screen-based works that involve the use of light and darkness. Focusing on two works, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Under Scan (London, 2008) and Gregory J. Markopoulos' Eniaios (Lyssaraia, 2012), it exposes the complexities that arise in the space/sensation relationship when there is an interchange of light and darkness. Moreover, it explores the ways in which screen-based works can function as ephemeral architecture and as communication vehicles between the physical environment and living agents. I will present Lozano-Hemmer's practice in dialogue with Markopoulos's screenings, in an attempt to define the curated event -as an experience and as a process -based on notions of immersion and the sensorial apprehension of space.

New Materialities of light and colour in spatial allegories

Proceedings of the AIC Conference, 2008

This paper aims to present the concept of materiality from a basis of the perception of colour and light as fundamental elements for the understanding of space. This dialogue is established between the synchronic/diachronic on one hand and on the other, between the underlying movement from natural to artificial environments. It is accomplished by reinforcing the relevance of interpretation of a “space-recipient” that by the effects of light and colour presents itself in constant mutation and with a variety of appearances. The apprehension of space includes intellectual, cultural and sensory characteristics changing from selective filters that determine the apprehended and rejected sensations. This includes external incentives - motivation and experience -, the biological or internal incentives and the individual's cultural values or groups. Meanings revealed by the potential inherent to the formal and communicative domains act as a structured process where time and allegories create the Ariadne’s thread which connects us to Earth. In fact, colour has elemental components that are common to most cultures and have revealed themselves since ancient times in terms of the relation between nature and metaphysics where behaviour, transformation and concept underlie the discovery of “new materialities” of colour and light.

Ambiances, 4 | 2018

2019

This article presents the results of a spatial experiment, which investigates the ambience potential of coloured illuminations in architecture. The experiment took place over a period of two weeks, situated in a semi-laboratory setting of a performance art installation. Qualitative methods inspired by sensory ethnography and cultural probes were applied to grasp the fullness and originality of human bodily sensations of coloured illumination by exploring its effects on participants’ perception of body-space interaction. During the days of experimentation participants were interviewed on their bodily sensation in and perception of a space, while being blindfolded and exposed to three different hues of illumination; red, blue and amber. Findings from the experiment showed how participants sensed their bodies and perceived the space around them in a comparatively different manner in relation to the different hues of illumination, independently of being blindfolded or not. By this, the ...