n.blog

its use is rare if one excepts the slightly moving tiny image on credit cards. The objects displayed are sometimes dubious (lots of scary images, monsters). however, holography remains as fascinating as complex. Michael Page has been producing and studying holography at OCAD, U of T and in his studio "the Photon League" in the basement of 401 Richmond street  
A fairly disappointingly expensive and difficult technique, holography is still under development. teams of scholars and techniques have tried to solve problems related to rendering and parallax and a tool named "the rail" has been devised to prepare the images for printing and making camera ready.
Page says holography has lots of potentials and further developments: creating full parallax holograms, mass-producible images as well as real time holograms are only a few of the goals set.

 

 holography is increasingly used in a number of areas  for medical imaging and visualization and architects/architectural models.  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=holography&search_type=
a number of artists have experimented with holography with some success.
 Ron English, for instance,  who has created holograms out of videos documentations of his billboard displays.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zpXLKAyESM

Meats Meier  is the author of this image

 

 

 

here are a few pictures of the photon league studio, where a workshop on holography took place a few days before Subtle Technologies 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By providing rare examples of experimental films, Bruce Elder showed how light can be manipulated to create radically different results and how it can be interpreted and filtered through the personal experience  of the artist. Light is primal, experiential and outside of language, almost a sacred energy, something that takes  but also gives.

For every image there is a form of energy. To illustrate this, Elder chose to show Moholy Nagy's light space modulator ,  a great example of how light as energy can be "modulated" to become a sculptural element.
On a different level, the works by animator Oskar Fischinger
combine music and images, and render the trajectory of dialogics and harmonics within the film, as if he was re-writing the notations

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/

http://www.oskarfischinger.org/

of course, this example is in deep contrast, though it is intimately connected with the work of Jim Davis,
an almost unknown film-maker who spent a long time experimenting with light, and colors. his films try to reproduce the ephemeral immateriality of light and the formation of colors in crystals and glasses, capturing, he thought,  " the essence of movements and light."

Marko Ciciliani is a composer and performer working with the experimental group "Bakin Zup"  
Interested in the intersection of light (especially electricity) and sound, he was surprised to see how different audience would react to the same composition.
Although his work uses light as an extension of musical parameters in composition,  many people still choose to close their eyes to better listen to the music played, instead of enjoying the piece as a whole.
intrigued by this phenomenon, Ciciliani started to explore multisensorial perception and the phenomenon of synaesthesia, the "involuntary stimulation and response from various senses while only one sense is directly stimulated."
While modernism has  somehow discouraged synhaesthesia   (and the idea of singularity and pureness in art, Clement Greenberg's idea that a piece of art has to be autonomous and self-contained), cognitively speaking,  it is an element that can be more prominent in certain people but that everybody harbors to a certain extent.
 
Ciciliani's goal is  to connect, in his works, light works traditionally tagged as "pure," "ordered," and "noisy" or "impure" music.

My Ultradeep I for 6 performers and Alias are two examples of his compositions and his collaboration with Bakin Zup

here is a short interview that explains Ciciliani's work

 

 

These pieces are the result of an assignment on "light" for the "modern physics" course at the Ontario College of Art and Design. after having explained to art students some scientific basics Robin Kingsburgh asked them to conduct practical  experiments and to devise a conceptual elaboration that drew from the experiments findings. the result, as you can see here, are quite diverse.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The prospective shaman lives in the darkness for the first years of his life.
only then s/he is allowed to experience life. in this way, s/he is encouraged to direct the introspection inside.
For Philip Ross, practicing a metaphorical endoscopy (nothing to do with the medical procedure), in this context, becomes an invitation to look inside ourselves, to visualize and re-inagining what our "inside" has to tell.
his works render this notion fairly well: they always hide something which is enclosed or which is trying to emerge from a hall-open lid or a vase.

it sis interesting that light can be interpreted as both a tool of introspection (like with Ross) as well as a mirror. A filmmaker and photographer, Curtis Wehrfritz's latest fascination lies with Daguerrotypes.  he claims "in 170 years the use of optics and their records have become the modern backbone of our recorded perception" thus, these devices are equally mimicking and mirroring the methods of perception of the human brain as well as they constitute mirrors of our experiences and our memories.

the daguerrotypes, printed on a mirror,  are small and ephemeral. they combine  an image and a reflection at the same time. the mirror is inextricably linked to the image that reflects it. The myth of narcissus and echo "illuminates" their inner symbolic features.

 

 

A professor of Physics and Astronomy, Jayanne English works with images captured through the telescope. Pictures of the sky that can be admired in popular science magazines are a bridge between the astronomer and the audience, as they bring a general idea of what the sky looks like and encourage people to know more. these images  taken with radio telescopes are colored artificially to distinguish the variety of gases and to distinguish their motion. often very appealing and meaningful to the scientist, they mislead the audience with non-standard and discipline specific color-coding, and other symbols that sometimes end up contradicting common sense intuitions. Visual literacy, knowledge of techniques of composition and color harmony as well as team work are often necessary to construct those award winning images we find in popular science magazines.

If English deals with the super-big and super-far, Boustany has to wrestle with the small, complex and in motion.
cells have pathways. In order to be healthy they have to reach a certain equilibrium. they have to count a certain number of deaths. too much  death is bad. But dying too little is a bad sign too.
fro the sake of research, it is possible to tell why and how cells die (through nechrosis, autophagy, or apoptosis) from the  way mytochondria mutate during this process. While Optical microscopes can hardly catch these transformations, Electromicroscopy allows to view one stage of the process, but it fails to explore it in its entirety.In fact once a cell is isolated and stained for viewing, is already dead or can no longer be utilized.
Thus, Boustany and her team have developed  an alternative technique that enable the use of a light microscope to determine the transformation of the cell's morphology. this technique is based on optical scatter imaging.

 

 

maybe an odd association, Jason Baerg's northern lights,  Jayanne English outreach pictures of the sky and Nada Boustany visualization of cell death have a lot to share after all: they both try to interpret and reconstruct narratives originating from the sight and the impression of light. they meet under the name of translation and outreach: the one that tries to make things more appealing and palatable to a wider audience and that tries to get a mediated story across. the difference lies in the topics: traditional narratives versus scientific data.

With his project, now in development and about to be turned into a 9 episodes animation series, Baerg engages with First Nation legends that explain the existence of the northern lights. his ambitions are multiple: in fact, Northern lights aims to "educate the public to Canada's Aboriginals relations to this phenomenon" and tries to capture the interest of  First Nations youth. At the same time, Baerg seeks to reconstruct a comprehensive narrative that collects and combines the many and diverse stories narrated by the Elders. Finally, a outreach effort, he decided to transmit  this enterprise with virtual rendition, 3D games and animation, performing several layers of translations that bridge different generations (elders vs youth), different interpretations and different means of communications (form oral communication to visual).
some examples:
http://www.stormspirits.ca/English/plain_truth/
http://www.youtube.com/user/painteravantvangarde

"...In 2008, where each year parcels of the Antarctic Ozone hole move over the southern part of Australia, our relationship with the visible and the invisible electromagnetic soup in which we live becomes much more complex."

By invoking the notion of Synchresis, Melinda Rakham illustrates how, in Australia maybe more than anywhere else, artists might manifest special bonds with light and, despite the differences in their approaches, they might display common elements and cross-modal threads.

Five artists
Robin Fox , George Khut ,Tracey Cornish, Paula Dawson (with Graeme Murphy)
and Chris Henschke clearly display different ways to interpret light and use it as a medium or source of inspiration, by attempting to manipulate it through sound ,
 by turning it into a medium that represents bio-feedback signals, by invoking the materiality of light manifestations in the form of electricity, by capturing it through holography ,and, finally, by experiencing the speed of light  through a synchrotron.

in a different context but in a similar vein, Pixy, by Natasha Roussel and Experientiae Electricae seek to use light to materialize a full, tri-dimentional material object.
The "light space modulator," moholy nagy's work , well highlighted in his 1930 film  suggests that "light will be the medium of the future."  light can be considered a new medium.

Thus, instead of just projecting and fixing light to the bi-dimensional surface of a screen, light  can be used to display video in a volume. like other projects that create interaction with buildings by using a technique of low resolution imaging or highly pixelated objects  (see some projects http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/02/urban-media-par.php) Pixy explores this idea in an immersive environment made of square pixels that form  low resolution videos.

light, here, is treated as a time-based medium integrated into the architecture.

the installation Pixy is, along with Diane Willow's Cascade and Circling, part of this year Subtle technologies exhibition at the Pixel gallery, entitled "Living Light."

Interestingly, Willow's bioluminiscent, ephemeral creatures are juxtapposed to  Pixy's squared, low-fi appearance. here is a brief interview with Camille Turner, the curator of the show, in which she explains how the two artworks work together.

 

 

if friday afternoon had focused on light as a naturally occurring essential phenomenon to which organisms respond, as well as produce, saturday morning was the turn of light as a constructed item that can be recreated to enrich the urban landscape. Like in the thursday short film, artificial light comes to compete with the stars.
Urban planner and light artist Leni Schendinger provided some reflections on light in urban space. light is not in the city for mere utilitarian purposes. it can actually create atmospheres and convey meanings. In opposition to the "general " trends that condemn artificial light as mainly the source of pollution, Schwendinger points out that  artificial light should not damage the environment. unfortunately, it is often badly planned and ill-located.
 
A thoughtful and ad hoc -designed urban plan should reveal and enhance the features of the urban space, like in many cities where light and colors in buildings and streets are used to support and clarify the structure of the city.

In addition,  colors can be added too, not  just clear light. in the last few years there have been projects to do so in a number of cities around the world, unified under the project LUCI,  Lighting Urban Community International (Montreal, among a number of other cities is a member) and the beautification projects in cities like Turin (luci d'artista).
Using colors to identify the main landmarks (the CN tower) and embellish those areas that have been abandoned or no longer operational (the parachute jump in Coney Island  now transformed in a colorful monument) is now a current trend.

finally, lighting programs may enhance perception of security and safety, provide
an organized visual environment, strengthen the city identity and its general visual and navigational legibility.