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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
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ations in the artificial light design is used as a way to promote
performative investigations. The light design is stable over time
but varied over space, and every movement by the investigator
is enhanced and qualified by the experience of light variation,
while standing still leaves the investigator with no feedback.
The light intensity, and how light falls onto the bodies, changes
depending on how and where they move. This differentiated in-
tensity makes people move in the examination of how the light
is experienced at different places in the lit areas. These are
qualities that operate as an embedded dynamic structure, and
lead the investigators into a dynamic state of investigation.
Staging nearness and distance
The frame-object causes a particular experience of being
coupled with the other on the opposite site. The frame that
separates somehow legitimates this intimate sense of cou-
pling. The felt or imagined distance caused by the complexity of
the situation can’t be measured in measurable parameters but
is comparable to standing in front of a mirror, just with the no-
table difference, that it is not yourself you see on the other side
of the framing, but another person. The two equal behavioural
conditions, placed opposite each other, generate an enhanced
sense of nearness while simultaneously producing a sense
of enhanced distance. Grosz speculates on the qualities of
spatialization: “If past, present, and future are always entwined
and make each other possible only through their divergences
and bifurcations, then perhaps there is a way to consider spa-
tiality in terms of relations of nearness and farness, relations
of proximity and entwinement, the interimplications of the very
near and the very far, rather than of numerals or geometry”
(Grosz 2001:129). The frame-object is deliberately designed to
promote a particular experiential condition, an enhanced sense
of spatial negotiation. (Fig 09 and 10)
The two ladies standing close on each side of the frame-object
(figure 10) are in a deep investigation of the nearness qualities
evoked by the staging. Grosz speculates along the lines of how
architectural devises can be said to promote certain experien-
tial conditions. In this case the frame-object stages a continu-
ous re-emergence of virtual-actual relations, within which the
ladies are engrossed.
“This possibility returns us once again to the vexing question
of the virtual and its particular spatial resonances. One cannot
of course directly specify what a virtual is, for insofar as it is,
insofar as it exists, it exists as actual. In the process of actual-
ization, the virtual annuls itself as such in order to re-emerge
as an actual that thereby produces its own virtualities. At best
one can specify what the virtual may produce, what effects or
differences it may generate” (Grosz 2001:129).
White-cube investigations on
experiential light design
Explorative processes of experiential light design
The performative method has been successfully used as a tool
in daylight workshops at the School of Architecture, Copenha-
gen, generating a specific mode of investigative practice with
explorative thinking through various procedures of abstraction.
The specific focus in the courses is on daylight kinetics, that is,
how kinetic structures form the daylight influx. The students
investigate possible designs of daylight openings, and interro-
gate how these designs are imperative for the unfolding of the
spatial qualities of lightness and darkness. (Fig 11 and 12)
The development of prototypes and experiential evidence
emerge through a series of authoring processes, iteratively
refined and often overlapping or re-visited:
1. The students develop particular experiential sensibilities
through performance training
2. Ideas are tested through serial explorations of design pos-
sibiliies in model sketching
3. A select model is built as a full-scale prototype
4. The team of students engage in repeated experience of light
situations within the prototypes
The full-scale prototypes are white cubes, 240 cm on all sides,
with an open top fully exposed to the sun and the sky. The
investigation explores the effect of the highly complex and dy-
namic daylight inflow, introduced as experiential staging of ar-
chitectural lighting designs. The projects described investigate
kinetic daylight mediators and their effect on the light qualities
and colours of the interior surface and volume of the cubes.
The daylight explorations make use of the experiential tech-
niques to stage situations in which the students simultaneously
act, experience and directs their own processes of performative
engagement. This method operates, as described previously,
with a selection of observer roles, and is specific in the way it
situates a collective of investigators in different positions of
observation within the same explorative engagement. The first
participant observes from a position inside the experience. The
second participant observes from a position outside the light
zone in continuous discussion with the first participant. The
third participant observes from an outside position and uses a
camera to frame and document the first-person experience.
Figure 13 shows the external observers standing on ladders,
taking notes and shooting photographs, while the experiential
participant explores the light situation in the white-box.