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- Convenors:
-
Cathy Greenhalgh
(Independent)
Eni Bankole-Race (Royal College of Art)
Lucietta Williams (University of the West of England)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Creativity
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 9
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel welcomes papers from practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers of light and investigates approaches to light requiring forms of artful and 'skilled vision' (Grasseni, 2009) and a "creative eye".
Long Abstract:
This panel investigates approaches to light requiring forms of artful and 'skilled vision' (Grasseni, 2009). Papers may address natural and artificial light in architecture, garden design; painting, photography, film; new media, VR, games; jewellery, fibreoptic smart clothing and textiles, or digital lumino-kinetics of stadium shows, light festivals, light art, installations and projection, where arts meet science and engineering. Papers could include the creative role of light in health, ritual or spirituality. In recent years light has emerged as a subject for research in anthropology (Bille and Sørensen 2007; Pandian 2015), in media (Cubitt, 2014) and cultural geography, Edensor (2017). We aim to develop an interdisciplinary conversation on light, bringing rich and diverse reports of anthropological approaches to this topic.
Light highlights material differences, textures and surfaces; it facilitates play with temporalities and spatial perception. Light may give agency, embellish and be a force of attraction and wonder, or provide an 'aesthetic coating' (Sheller and Urry, 2004:8) to the body and environment. As the ever-increasing use of electrical light by humans depletes ecological resources (use of electricity, water and chemicals, and light pollution), working with light may require expertise in addressing sustainability, consumption and labour in an "over-illuminated" world, where powers of distinction between light and dark blur. This is skill and creative engagement with chromatic range, tone and contrast, shininess and dullness, opacity and transparency, light capture and emanation. Skilled or artful vision in this context requires keen observation of light qualia subtleties and intensities, combined with a purposeful and communicative aesthetics of light and darkness.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Based on the analysis of artists working with shadows (Yamashita, Kagan, Gallagher), the talk delimits the range of an anthropology of shadows and proposes an unbiased reassessment of 'light's dark sibling'.
Paper long abstract:
Where there is light, there is shadow. But is it? The ontological status of shadows is far from clear. Even though shadows may serve all kinds of concrete purposes (as symptoms, signs, media, markers, artwork, etc.), they remain hard to grasp. Are they something, or just "holes in light" (Baxandall) - a special form of nothingness?
From an anthropological perspective, three aspects of the shadow need closer scrutiny: its functioning as sort of a hybrid - yet meaningful - 'quasi-object' (Serres), its refusal to fit into a simple agent/patient dichotomy, and its complex relation to questions of epistemology and time.
Shadows transcend the border between ontological fields and allow for the emergence of meaning without an intentional subject. When purposefully used in art, our perceptive routines are shaken and we are forced to reconsider seemingly stable truths about the outside world.
Taking a closer look at three shadow-artists (Yamashita, Kagan, Gallagher), the talk delimits the range of an anthropology of shadows and proposes an unbiased reassessment of 'light's dark sibling'.
Paper short abstract:
The paper considers the capture of light with examples of my auto-ethnographic experimental video work in lens-less (pinhole) undertaken in Venice.
Paper long abstract:
I will reflect on the capture of light in photography/cinematography (neither purely analogue nor purely digital) as exemplified by my auto-ethnographic experimental work with lens-less (pinhole) high definition video.
Over many years my art practice has employed photography, moving image and installation to explore the physics of light. I address how light is captured under different conditions and via different means, with the intention of a challenging and subverting audience perception.
Using a hybrid of analogue and digital forms, I consider how tropes of technical light capture - from the camera obscura to the pinhole aperture, via the lens - have altered our perception and continue to dominate Western values. Zielinski (2009) declares: 'Do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old'. In my practice-as-research/auto-ethnographic artworks, a 'bricolage' method, combining outmoded optical light capturing devices with the latest technological ones has become key, producing some original results.
I will concentrate on my current video work centred on the ambient light in Venice, my mother's home city and links with Venice's glass production which generated the first spectacles as well as Galileo's telescope lenses. The aim is firstly, to immerse the viewer in an experience of Venice's light, recalling the city's renowned light quality beloved of artists and filmmakers; secondly to reveal how the camera obscura's single point of view as a method of light capture has come to dominate how we negotiate the visual world, transforming literal and figurative frames of reference.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will describe the process of bringing a facet of glass to a high shine, exploring how this entails a requirement to attend to the material's relation with light.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will share experience from my research as a student and apprentice glassmaker in the Czech Republic. Although much of our modern experience of glass (as windows, camera lenses or screens) is one of transparency - in which we seek to see what lies beyond the glass rather than the glass itself - what often counts for glassmakers is the material's nuanced relation with light. By harnessing the unique affinity of glass for light they learn to enfold light into the emerging glass forms so that the glowing material shifts and changes according to the motion of the world and the movement of the viewer. It is as though they were carving with light itself.
Beginning with the process of polishing a face of glass I will explore one way in which a glassmaker becomes attuned to the light about them, namely by traversing the surface as it is crisscrossed with wheels of differing grades and materials. In the process, the maker becomes immersed in an expansive atmosphere, as the face of glass is transformed into a landscape of shifting light. From moment to moment, what is inside seems to rise to the surface, or to recede, until - in seeking to create a particular polish - one can hardly tell what is present within or without.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers cinematographers' skilled vision and cultural approaches to lighting the face, eyes and skin in fiction cinema - using ethnographic research, pedogogic praxis on gender and diversity and recent diasporic and world cinema examples.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers cinematographers' skilled vision and cultural approaches to lighting skin, face and eyes in fiction cinema. I use interviews from ethnographic research and recent diasporic and world cinema examples positioned against the historical mainstream (black-and-white and colour). This builds on my prior research on cinematographers' light as expertise, expression, material and energy. Whilst lighting may need to be "beautiful" for commercial purposes, it is predominantly intended to reveal and conceal dramatic intent and to enhance a chronotope (time-space frame) underlying film narratives. There is an effort of light and an "afterimage" audiences carry when finding this light and dark (from the subtle pastel to the highly contrasted) image striking and memorable. The human facial presence "as light" gives agency to the character being played and highlights the actors' performance and movement / choreography. Cinematographers draw on a vocabulary of light in the studio and on location (with natural and artificial light) on different types of films. I consider their visualisation, planning, testing and influences as well as serendipitous discoveries working with actors and personal socio-cultural artistic intent. Krista Thompson writes on African diasporic expression: 'The use of light produced though visual technologies generates distinct aesthetic, synesthetic, physiological, and phenomenological effects, creating and denying types of viewership in particular performative and spatial contexts'(2015 :141). The paper draws on years of ethnographic research with feature film cinematographers as well as my pedagogic praxis around gender and diversity when working with cinematography students on the expressivity of lighting and faces.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to explore how walking through a rural area of Victoria, Australia, is continuously characterised by encounters with light. Light solicits attention, usually unreflexively, in how it is deflected, absorbed or reflected, attuning bodies towards the close at hand or the distant
Paper long abstract:
Drawing upon my previous work in investigating This paper seeks to explore how walking through a rural area of Victoria, Australia, is continuously characterised by encounters with light. Light solicits attention, but this is usually unreflective. By deploying photography as a means to explore the distinctive ways in which light is reflected across water, is absorbed by dark rocks and holes in the ground, produces shadows of varying depth and density, dazzles the eyes, and tones the colours of the landscape at various scales. Walking cannot be conceived as a seamless progress but is sequentially typified by different modes of attention and attunement. In addition, the landscape may be identified by these myriad defects of light and the ways in which humans sensorially encounter space and make sense of what they see according to a plethora of cultural conventions. As a relative stranger to the Australian landscape, a landscape in which the luminescence and clarity of the defects of light are unfamiliar one accustomed to the toned down, murkier tones of the British countryside, such effects seem more prominent, revealing the situated ways in which we inhabit place and landscape.
Paper short abstract:
The Burning Man arts festival in Nevada, USA, is inextricably tied with the use of anthropogenic light as a form of artistic expression. This article explores the origins of this unorthodox use of light as a tool for individual artistic expression and social engagement
Paper long abstract:
From its modest beginnings as a beach bonfire in San Francisco in 1986, to today's vast week-long desert event, the Burning Man arts festival of Nevada, USA, is inextricably tied with the use of anthropogenic light as a form of artistic expression.
This article explores the origins of the unorthodox use of light at the event, in three primary contexts.
First, there is fire art, which is expression through luminosity at its most basic and primal forms. This encompasses a wide range of performance and visual art, ranging from the simple immolation of inflammable sculptures, to explosive gas technology, to fire performances with liquid fuel flame.
Second, there is sculptural lighting which ultimately derives from a more prosaic need: the event organisers' stipulation that artists illuminate their physical works, for safety reasons, at night. This requirement has evolved into complex light installations, many of which have no particular visual value in daylight, and which emphasise temporal and ephemeral experiences.
Third, there is the impact of technological change and the integration of "maker" culture into the Burning Man event. The increasingly widespread availability of affordable and digitally-controlled lighting technologies have contributed to the carnival atmosphere of Burning Man night. The event has also become a popular testbed of light art technologies.
Case studies of each mode are discussed, particularly in the context of the deliberate creation of landscapes of light for individual artistic expression and tools for social engagement.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the symbolism and aesthetic value/significance of cicatrices in traditional Yoruba culture, and examines the secondary patterns formed by the play of light and shadows on these sculptures in the skin.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates the symbolism and aesthetic value/significance of cicatrices in traditional Yoruba culture, and examines the secondary patterns formed by the play of light and shadows on these sculptures in the skin.
The first body adornments in pre-history times were probably symbols and images daubed or incised onto the skin. Anthropological attention on inscribed skin has largely concentrated on their significance as identity markers - status, gender etc. Foucault refers to 'the body as text upon which social reality is inscribed' (Docile Bodies, 1975), while Gell believes that "with tattoo, the body multiplies; the additional organs and subsidiary selves are created; spirits, ancestors, rulers and victims take up residence in an integument which begins to take on a life of its own…" (Gell, 1993).
I am of the Daramola/Jeje school of opinion in regarding traditional African cicatrisation as a quintessence of beauty (Daramola, Jeje, 1967, Adeoye, 1979) and creativity (Faleye 2008).
To indicate the ubiquity of scarification (cicatrisation) in traditional Yoruba society, the sign for 'okola' (one with facial scars) in the sign language of the Yoruba deaf community, is the same used to signify 'The Yoruba'.
In this paper, my interest is primarily on the sensibilities that govern the aesthetic value of this practice, how light is used to emphasise and highlight body modification. This includes the use of foreign object insertion to achieve a keloid effect, in order to create a 3 dimensionality that catches the light and produces patterns and shadows on the skin.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses findings and process of practice-based research into wearable light focusing on light as a medium in interaction with the body as a dynamic projection surface. A reflective and adaptive methodology characterises the process across a series of solo and collaborative projects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses findings and process of an ongoing experimental, practice-based research into wearable light and its implications in terms of the visual perception of the body and the agency of wearers or performers.
The research investigates how wearable light interacts with the body and its environment; it explores how this interaction shapes the visual perception of the body and the agency of the wearer or performer. It investigates the mechanics and effects of placing light on the body and establishes a critical vocabulary for the description and evaluation of wearable light leading to an emergent visual language of wearable light that can be applied across. disciplines. Practice outcomes cross boundaries between design, performance and lens-based media with potential for future applications within health, wellbeing and personal safety.
A reflective and adaptive methodology characterises the research process in which the researcher integrates the roles of participant and observer in an evolving series of projects and in which practice is the main vehicle, informed by the selection of critical context and continuous external feedback. Due to the cross-disciplinary nature of wearable light collaborative projects with practitioners in art, design and performance as well as with technological experts are balanced with experimental 'solo projects' in which the researcher is the sole author and takes on all roles required to complete the project. The paper will focus in particular on the role of collaborations vis-à-vis solo projects in driving the research process and outcomes.