LIGHT + TECH 121
Left The quest to capture and master light has led to numerous inventions and bright ideas from some of history’s leading thinkers
Below Light serves as a foundational experience not just for humans, but even for animals who operate either diurnally or nocturnally
Until relatively recently attempts to understand light mainly centred on vision, but as Rudolf Arheim wrote in Art and Visual Perception, ‘light is more than just the physical cause of what we see. Even psychologically it remains one of the most fundamental and powerful of human experiences.’ In the past few decades, we’ve found out much more about perception, learnt a great deal about what light does to and with our bodies, and we’re beginning to discover what this might mean for our health and wellbeing. Added to this, new technologies are being developed that take the use of light beyond illumination into areas of medicine, computing and communications. Stories with Light also looks at some
bizarre ideas such as extramission, the oddly persistent belief that light issues from the eye, and puzzles such as the strange case of Patient M, who was shot through the head and as a result saw the world upside down. Then there’s the scientist who grew eyes on the legs of a fly and the man who made music with street lamps. Although it’s intended as a light read, the book also makes a serious point by emphasising the value of darkness and its role in our evolution. When we began to control light, it
was through firelight or the dim glow of a rudimentary oil lamp, technologies that may even pre-date homo sapiens, but certainly arrived long before the window, our earliest means of manipulating natural light. But, in the space of just four human
lifetimes, we’ve come to experience thousands of times more lighting in our daily and nightly lives than any of our ancestors. Around 250 years ago, the Great Illumination brought an astonishing increase in our consumption of ‘artificial’ light. Roger Fouquet and Peter Pearson of Imperial College, London, calculated that by the year 2000 total lighting consumption in the UK was 25,000 times higher than in 1800. Put another way, we were using 2.5 million percent more light. It wasn’t until after the First World War that electric lighting began to dominate, largely because governments of every stripe pushed for greater use of energy. The more resources we could burn up, the better, they said, because using energy promoted economic growth, increased productivity and boosted consumption. Efforts to promote and exploit new lighting technologies have been hair- raising at times, including offering the hire of an electric light girl: a human luminaire to light the hallways of the rich. Lighting rivalries produced early examples of fake news, trolling and influencers. Light became a propaganda tool, a weapon of war and a means of social control.
As it gathered momentum, the Great Illumination was viewed with just as much suspicion, fatefulness and fascination as today’s digital revolution. Instantaneous in historical terms but not fast enough for some at the time, its arrival, like that of smart tech, was accompanied by concerns over health, privacy and safety. It created a technological divide between town and country; radically altered work patterns; spread ideas, shaped trade and boosted consumption, all at a massive cost to the environment.
One of the lessons that emerges from the book is that the future of lighting design lies in planning, moulding and tempering
our use of illumination to enhance places and spaces creatively and responsibly, says Grubb. Above all, our lit environment should be, as the urban planner Kevin Lynch put it, ‘made by art, shaped for human purposes’. In other words, lighting should serve our every interest, including pleasure. ‘When we look at a project, one of the first questions we ask,’ says Grubb, ‘is “where’s the joy?” Whatever the setting, it has to have magic.’
Stories with Light will be published towards the end of this year. See
www.michaelgrubbstudio.com for more details
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