Surfaces of Lights: a conversation with the space

Abstract

This research project explores the possibilities of rendering perception and experience of space by manipulating the transparency, translucency and reflectivity qualities of light materials. The project’s construction often engages with spatial extensions by projecting images onto the surfaces of the existing architecture (structures). In the investigation, the works often utilize the architecture to create immersive environments which gives the receptive viewer a heightened sensory awareness. In an installation, light is viewed as a matrix; the screen becomes a permeable surface, drawing us deeply into the architecture. This is because, light can only be tangibly received when it is supported by the formation of the existing structure. Hence, light is viewed as an interdependent agent that holds as a place where reality is being mediated with the concrete physical spaces around us changing into a screen. These haptic qualities that manipulate any given space has revealed relationships between the forms of the media, relationships that shift and negotiate the question of the divide between the artwork, the environment and the viewers in way that prompt the researcher to re-consider the nature of those very divisions as surface tension. Light as a surface, the screen puts forward its own materiality and therefore always transcends its apparent nature to inherent noisy environments for the transmission of meaning to happen – “noise” as a quality of a surface. The characteristics of a surface seen as screen or medium holds the potential for being a place that gathers difference, a place where human relations come together. This even gives rise to unexpected forms of participation. Traces of these participatory events change the form of visuality in the artwork and render other invisible relationships in the space visible.