About a year and a half ago I lit a dance piece that explored the relationship between humanity and technology. It had a large video component including live interactive video. In considering the light I wanted to create a world bridging the space between the human and the technological. The lighting rig was small and consisted of a mixture of incandescent lights and fluorescents. All the lights were in a color range of 4500-5600K. Daylight.
The use of fluorescents was obvious once I made it but my reasoning behind their use in that piece was a little different than “I want cold and mechanical.” If you look at the color spectrum of an incandescent light it is a gentle wave with peaks in the amber range and valleys in the cyan, but soft and gentle slopes define the nature of the light emitted from those sources. Fluorescent light is something else entirely. Like other discharge sources the wave form of the light spectrum is comprised of sharp 90 degree peaks and valleys as well as violent spikes in certain sections of the visible spectrum.
It was this digital quality that I was interested in. And while the fluorescent is an explicit example of digital light, behind the scenes it is all digital. With the exception of the most primitive lighting systems every light used in live performance is controlled by a computer. We see intensity values in the human friendly 0-100% range but this is just for ease of readout displays. The computer sends 0-255 hex values across a digital network to dimmers which convert those values into percentages of a 10v sine wave that gets chopped at various points depending upon the value received. map(0, 255, 0, 10); map(0, 10, 0, 100);
But light, especially incandescent light, is intensely analog. Anyone who has tried to do a zero count blackout and been frustrated when a zero count really takes about 0.5 seconds to reach complete darkness knows this. The problem is made worse dealing with larger lamps like a 5K where a blackout can take upwards of ten seconds.
Working in this digital medium for a while now I have seen points of interest come and go. I will find myself obsessed with color for months or years on end and then spend long periods of time only working with monochromatic palettes. I will explore texture or angle or the very quality of light itself in similar fad like ways. Yet two currents of aesthetic inquiry remain constant in my work. One is an interest in natural and organic forms and movements. The other, and deeply related to the first, is an inquiry into random chance and chaotic events.
Light provides ample opportunity to explore both of these ideas. Most digital lighting control is sufficiently sophisticated to get decent random effects tried out and there is as much or more technology available to explore ideas of organic forms.
At the same time there are distinct limitations. The scale of many of the ideas I want to try are cost prohibitive in the lighting realm, certainly on my own meager budget. While I can try out a handful of ideas on various shows, most shows I design do not lend themselves to the kinds of explorations that I am truly interested in. Thus it becomes a game of waiting for that one show to test that one idea.
Enter the world of computer graphics. It only takes a couple minutes to copy the code for John Conway’s Game of Life. From there, myriad parameters can be explored and manipulated for interesting results. Even the largest lighting rig does not contain the complexity to look at emergent forms and patterns in chaos at any scale of interest. Yet just a few lines of code can do all that and more.
The world we live in is technologic and interconnected. For art to truly capture the spirit of the world it must engage directly with that reality. Embracing and exploring our increasingly digital lives is both obvious and obscure. It is easy to put a cell phone on stage, or build a sculpture out of used computer parts, or paint with pixels. But doing that in such a way that furthers our understanding of our own humanity is the difficult task.
With the addition of a single color and a slight blur effect the Game of Life evolves from blinky computer simulation, to lifelike organic drama. It is turning a microscope on bits and capturing their millisecond of life. The line between the analog nature of life and the digital nature of computers is thin if not outright illusory. The shifting pixels on the screen become a life and death battle for supremacy. Survival of the fittest. Light and dark become life and death.
Having been in the business of creating fantasy worlds my entire adult life, I never would have thought that moving on to such a small stage would open up so many possibilities.
