Pierre R. Auboiron, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris

Indexed Lights

Keywords: urban light art, digital technology, Yann Kersalé, Toyo Ito, Kaoru Mende

‘The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything that’s eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy.’ Ralph Lombreglia.

One of the most vivid modern metaphors for light is its allegoric embodiment of electricity. Although invisible, electricity is often represented by brightly-coloured sparks and flashes. In the collective consciousness light is the true substance of electricity. Therefore, it is not surprising that a light is found on most electrical appliances indicating that they are in working order, or, to put it differently, whether the electrical current is active. On a computer, small flickering lights indicate an active hard drive or network connection. These lights are vital sensors indicating that our ever more humanised computers are working.¹ Many people are familiar with the image of HAL, the computer which played a leading role in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Space Odyssey. HAL’s physical presence was manifested by a visual sensor: a simple lens lit by an inner reddish glow. It is worth noting that Arthur C. Clark describes HAL as a simple ‘spherical lens’ in his epic. The red glow was Kubrick’s addition; it allowed him to animate HAL with an inner fire ² giving HAL a disconcertingly human feel. This is directly linked with both metaphorical and metaphysical aspects of light: since the origin of humankind, light has represented and embodied what is invisible and intangible as well as what has disappeared.

Visual Culture is here and now and its hegemony within our cities no longer needs to be proved. The history of urbanism tells us that the City has always been the place of every paroxysm: technological, social, cultural, artistic and economic. From this perspective, the City has naturally become the shrine where all forms of visual media are not just celebrated but even over-consumed. It is the place where all aspects of human activity are concentrated, emphasised and crystallised. Light — as the essence of any visual communication, and new technologies — as prevailing information vectors, has both played a leading role in the hegemonic expansion of the visual within the City. Cities have naturally become the privileged location of this complete and radical transformation of the rhythm of human society.

Architects and town planners have always obsessively sought to master light, but it has proved ever-elusive. The discovery of electricity and its large-scale generation provided the first true opportunity to push back the night. From this perspective, light, which was initially used to make our streets safer, has swiftly become a powerful tool which rationalises and signposts the City at nightfall. At night, a city is first announced from the distance to an approaching traveller by its diffused lights in the sky. However, due to the development and democratisation of new technologies, urban lighting schemes have entered a new age and, accompanying this, an alternative and oneiric approach to light has emerged. This has lead to a significant break with the traditional comprehension of light in the city.

Two artists in particular have embraced this new approach to urban lighting: the French light designer Yann Kersalé and the Japanese architect Toyo Ito in collaboration with the engineer Kaoru Mende. While it is sometimes difficult to say whether today’s Japanese culture is more Western than Oriental, Kersalé and Ito have both shown how questionable it would be to limit the study of current urban lighting to Western culture alone as it is a truly pan-cultural phenomenon. Using very complex lighting systems, made of captors and computers, these artists can materialise and visualise environmental phenomena such as noises, draughts, the current of a river and invisible human activity on the buildings themselves. Thereby they intend to make buildings fit back into their historical and socio-geographical environment.

A Societal Indexation of Building Lighting

Yann Kersalé is a French visual artist born in 1955. He has worked with light for over 20 years, and has collaborated consistently with the French architect Jean Nouvel. Kersalé uses light as a societal tracer, which can recreate the historical and socio-geographical surrounds of a building. Using Mirzoeff’s words, we can say that Yann Kersalé’s light installations ‘seek out an intersection between visibility and social power’. This is particularly evident in the piece entitled La Ville-fleuve (The River-City).

Fig. 1. Yann Kersalé, La ville-fleuve, 1991-1998. © Yann Kersalé - AIK

In 1992 the city of Nantes entrusted Yann Kersalé with the lighting of its cathedral. In this project, the artist has broken the tacit rule for lighting a Gothic cathedral, which suggests that light should only outline the building’s verticality. At night, the massive cathedral of Nantes is totally disintegrated by 1,900 blue spotlights. Their blue hue varies constantly according to data recorded by capturing devices set in the bed of the river Loire. The effect of this variation evokes Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, beingcloser to the idea of visual impression than to the idea of representation. The nocturnal aspect of the building evolves from day to day depending on the strength of both the river’s current and the ocean’s tide.

Kersalé’s intention was to put the cathedral back into its historical socio-geographical context. To describe his concept, Kersalé uses the term ‘geo-poetics’ ³. Indeed, the city of Nantes originally flourished thanks to its location by the estuary of the river Loire. The river could be considered as the main artery of the medieval city with the cathedral as its heart.

Fig. 2. Yann Kersalé, Le théâtre-temps, 1993-. © Yann Kersalé - AIK

A year later Kersalé worked in Lyon on another project entitled Le Théâtre-temps (The Time-Theatre). He was asked to set up a new lighting system on the roof of Lyon’s Opera House which had recently been renovated by the French architect Jean Nouvel. The red lighting of the roof changes depending on the level of human activity inside the building. This activity is constantly recorded by capturing devices and video cameras throughout the building. In this project the lighting puts the emphasis not only on a piece of architecture combining Neoclassical and modern styles, but also on the societal functions of the opera house which is at the heart of one of the main districts of the city. Kersalé helps us understand that a building has its own life form ⁴ and story to tell. His varying lighting tells us that the Opera House is constantly full of activity, even outside opening hours. Thus a diffused, pulsing glow betrays overnight rehearsals.

Fig. 3. Yann Kersalé, Le théâtre-temps, 1993-. © Yann Kersalé - AIK

The same desire to make a building fit its societal environment governed the building of Toyo Ito’s Tower of Winds in Yokohama in 1986. This tower was made as a ventilation and water tank facility for a mall situated immediately beneath it. A series of perforated aluminium panels form an oval cylinder all around the concrete structure. A very complex lighting system, also based on the use ofcapturing devices, allows the materialisation and visualisation of ‘natural’ phenomena such as ambient noise and the movement of wind around the tower. The outer structure of the tower can look either like a brightly floodlit envelope or like a translucent film animated by colourful waves. A critic described the tower as an ‘audio-visual seismograph’ displaying a variation in lighting ‘ranging from glowing sparks to flashing strobe light, from geometrically regular intervals to amorphous shifts and flows, from retarded slow-motion to stroboscopic excitement, with all kinds of transformations and variants in between.’ ⁵

Ito’s work is based on a stratified perception of urbanism which can be roughly summed up as a two-layered system: the layer of the urban fabric comprising buildings, roads, rivers, etc. and the phenomenological layer comprising human influx, draughts, thoughts and data flows. According to Toyo Ito ‘this project is a conversion of the invisible rhythm and colour (made tangible through light, sound, air, etc.) of the city of which bodies are subconsciously aware due to a variable pattern of light.’ ⁶ Due to a lack of funds and maintenance, The Tower of Winds, has not, or has only been partially illuminated in recent years.

This type of project is not exclusively Japanese or French. When Jonathan Speirs was asked in 1996 to design the lighting of the technical tower of Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, he decided to turn it into a Tower of Time. There are three different light indexations: the interior lighting changes according to the Zodiac cycle, while light ‘on the exterior reflects the time of year, starting with green for spring, and running through yellow, red and blue, denoting each subsequent season in a gradual wash of colour’. ⁷ Last but not least, lines of light tubing delineate the eight stories and indicate the day of the week. This complex abstract clock obviously echoes ancient observatories like Stonehenge and the ancestral desire to adjust human activity to natural cycles.

In 1997, James Turrell was commissioned to light the office building and computer centre for the natural gas industry in Leipzig: the Verbundnetz AG. The building is totally self-sufficient in terms of energy due to both its own gas-fuelled power-station and to a system adjusting the heating and air-circulating systems. The artist decided to index his lighting to this autarchic technological world. The light colours vary according to the temperature that the energy supplier provides. According to Turrell ‘Light should be a material with which we build’ ⁸. This suggestion echoes among light designers throughout the last third of the twentieth century.

New technologies and urban oneirism

All the artists mentioned above have based their work on a novel social or environmental indexation of light. Thanks to the sensitive application of new technologies, they make concepts and aspects of our everyday life visible and more tangible. Thereby, they try to fight the decline in interpersonal communication in today’s urban life which is one of the results of increasing visuality. In this instance, computers, associated with light, act like prostheses and compensate for our inability to comprehend our environment in its entire complexity. They materialise phenomena we can no longer perceive because we have developed our visual sense to the detriment of our other senses. Here the artist’s work does not deal with creating something new but with making existing things visible. Ito, Turrell or Kersalé do not claim to produce an aesthetic experience in their work. They do not use light for its ability to mesmerise, but for its ability to embody the intangible. In some ways, this can be compared to the use of tracers in biology which reveal invisible processes or organisms.⁹ Thus, they teach us how to look again at our direct environment by looking beyond the static aesthetic veneer ¹⁰ which now covers and conceals all aspects of society. After his collaboration with Ito on the Tower of Winds, Kaoru Mende commented that ‘we are getting fewer opportunities to enjoy the sense of changing time. Part of the reason is that we have become accustomed to lighting environments which always stay the same.’ ¹¹. Thanks to this visual experience, people are becoming visually aware of the complex and highly interwoven societal system in which we live. This concurs with the desire of contemporary architects to incorporate light as a material in its own right as well as providing nocturnal visibility, when designing public buildings. From this perspective, they offer a more organic and intimate perception of their buildings by depriving them of any precise outlines and invading them with light. Thus Toyo Ito explains that ‘the Tower (of winds) with such physical presence loses its presence after sunset and metamorphoses into a phenomenon of light. I refer to this metamorphosis from an opaque substance into a transparent object of light as ‘fictional”. ¹²

‘Fictional’ may be a key word to help comprehend this very highly-aesthetised¹³ society in which we are living; a society where even dreams have long become standardised consumables delivered on-line. Sight remains our last means to comprehend a world where we live immersed in a global visual cacophony from which it has become very difficult to isolate any particular message. Wind, air, feelings and ideas may be seen as fictional because they are not visible; in other words all that cannot be seen is barely considered anymore. Human visual sense has hypertrophied in the course of the last century and tends to supplant other senses.

This societal phenomenon cannot only be explained as an overdeveloped societal narcissism. Western societies are now revolving around the hypothetical concept of a single, standardised, fictional self. It heralds the end of any form of social cohesion and with this in mind specialists in the Humanities, such as Susan Buck-Morss, now agree that autism appears to be a societal interpretative model much more relevant than narcissism. New technologies have played a leading role in producing and maintaining this societal autism by disconnecting people from their real environment in favour of a so-called virtual society. Paradoxically this paper shows that computers can also help people rediscover and comprehend their direct environment when hijacked by visual artists and designers. Their creations do not deal with any fantasised vision of the society rooted in science fiction, but with a direct confrontation of everyday reality. ¹⁴ This could be summarised by Wyndham Lewis: ‘The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.’ This shows that, with the benefit of hindsight, computers can help us live in the here and now instead of throwing us into a frantic individual rush to the future.

We may now moderate the widespread notion that computers are synonymous with a cold and sanitised individuality. For instance when Yann Kersalé or Toyo Ito tell the story of a particular building or district, they force the viewer to gaze afresh at the world. The current association of light and new technologies in large Light Festivals represents a new step in today’s reappropriation of our urban and technological environments. The city has become much more than a simple artistic subject, it is now a large-scale location for societal experimentation. It seems that the last gaps in dreams must be sought in the eye of the visual whirlwind itself, in other words in the City itself.

November 2004

Notes

1. We have all at some time anxiously stared at our computer lights waiting for them to flicker while hoping that hours of work had not been lost.

2. In some ways, both the metaphors of life and electricity can be superimposed : the electric current goes through an appliance as life flows through the human body.

3. Here Kersalé obviously plays on both the meaning and the etymology of the word ‘poetics’ which comes from the Ancient Greek ‘to make’.

4. Light is unconsciously but deeply linked to the idea of life.

5. Neumann, D. (2002), Architecture of the Night, the Illuminated Building, Berlin, Prestel Verlag, p. 204

6. Berwick, C. (1998), ‘The Tower of Winds and the Architecture of Sound, an interview with Toyo Ito’, The Take Magazine. http://www.thetake.com/take05/take04/html/42ndst.html (7 November 2005).

7. Neumann, D. (2002), Architecture of the Night, the Illuminated Building, Berlin, Prestel Verlag, p. 214.

8. Cooley, R. (2001), ‘Interview with James Turrell: Adventures in Perception.’ Architectural Lighting. March.

9. Here we must think of one of the most popularised scientific images, the electrophoresis of DNA under ultraviolet lighting. This very strong image is linked with the decoding of life. It is no accident that memory sticks or USB ports are increasingly lit with hues evoking ultraviolet rays.

10. This means Aesthetics should not be considered as an ideal any more. Aesthetics is now something between a societal norm and a self-inflicted torture. Nowadays, any object, from the most insignificant to the most astonishing, is always perfectly but impersonally designed.

11. Mende, K. (2000), ‘Trends in Urban lighting in Japan’, Philips Lamps and Gear Magazine, 4:1.

12. Berwick, C. (1998), ‘The Tower of Winds and the Architecture of Sound, an interview with Toyo Ito’, The Take Magazine. http://www.thetake.com/take05/take04/html/42ndst.html (7 November 2005).

13. C.f. Michaud, Y. (2003), L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique, Coll. Les Essais, Paris: Stock.

14. Part of the strength of 2001, A Space Odyssey lies in the fact that Kubrick contented himself with representing HAL by a simple glowing lens. That gives it a stronger presence than any kind of anthropomorphic robot and evokes the red lamp which marks the presence of God in a church.

Select Bibliography

Bouchier, M. (ed.) (2002), Lumière,  Art(s) des Lieux series, Brussels: Ousia.

Cooley, R. (2001), ‘Interview with James Turrell: Adventures in Perception’, Architectural Lighting , March.

Kersalé, Y. (1995), Lumière Matière, Gallery Ma, Book 11, Japan.

Kersalé, Y. (2004), ‘Géopoétique de l’espace’, Penser la ville par l’art contemporain, Masboungi, A. (ed.), Projet urbain series, Paris: Éd. de la Villette, pp. 71-75. cf. the following papers in particular:

Makiarus, M. (ed.) (2000), De la lumière. Revue d’esthétique, 12, Paris : Ed. Jean-Michel Place.

Masboungi A. (ed.) (2003) Penser la ville par la lumière, Projet urbain series, Paris : Éd. de la Villette, cf. the following papers in particular:

Combarel, E., ‘Et la nuit recrée la ville’, pp. 104-106.

Fachard, L., ‘Scénographie au service de la ville’ pp. 54-62.

Fiori, S., ‘Rencontre avec le public du festival des lumières’, pp. 89-89.

Gandelsonas, M., ‘Logique des signes – la nuit américaine’, pp. 100-103.

Kersalé, Y., ‘Art-ménagement du territoire’, pp. 64-69.

Narboni R., ‘Brève histoire de l’urbanisme lumière’, pp. 17-23.

Neumann, D. (2002), Architecture of the Night, the Illuminated Building, Berlin: Prestel Verlag.

Valère, V. (2000), De la lumière, Technè, 12, Paris, Centre de recherche et restauration des musées de France, CNRS-UMR 171, pp. 34-49.

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