From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom 0816694435, 9780816694433

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F ROM L IG H T T O DA R K

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F ROM L IG H T T O DA R K Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom Tim Edensor

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-8166-9442-6 (hc) ISBN: 978-0-8166-9443-3 (pb) Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 22 21 20 19 18 17

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Contents

Introduction: Geographies of L ig h t a n d D a r k 

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Part I. Light 1. Seeing with Landscape, Seeing with Light  2. Under the Dynamic Sky: Living and Creating with Light

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Part II. Illumination 3. Electric Desire: Lighting the Vernacular and Illuminating Nostalgia

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4. Caught in the Light: Power, Inequality, and Illumination

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5. Festivals of Illumination: Painting and Playing with Light

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6. Staging Atmosphere: Public Extravaganzas and Domestic Designs

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Part III. Dark 7. Nocturnes: Changing Meanings of Darkness

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8. The Reenchantment of Darkness: The Pleasures of Noir

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C o n c l u s i o n : T h e N o v e l t y o f L ig h t a n d t h e Va l u e o f D a r k n e s s  Acknowledgments B ibli o g r a p h y  Index

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Introduction

Geographies of Light and Dark

T h e lig h t o f d a w n triggers birds to begin singing; as dusk draws in, they head to where they roost. The brilliant daylight that saturates the salt lakes of central Tunisia bakes the white sand into a sharp brilliance, causing eyes to squint. Nordic architects manipulate the light outside so that it floods interior space, toning atmospheres and highlighting forms and textures. Astronomers seek the nocturnal cloudless skies found in dark sky parks. Young children cower under bedclothes and fear the darker space under the bed as the lights are turned off. People enter restaurants of total gloom to sample the tastes of unseen food and interact with other diners whom they cannot visually perceive. Police searchlights catch suspects in the glare of the beam, causing them to run for cover of darkness or to surrender. The lurid illuminated advertisements of New York’s Times Square compete for attention in a chaotic medley of light and color, luring tourists and night-­time revelers. Residents participate in processions around their towns while carrying homemade lanterns on commemorative, convivial, festive occasions, reinforcing a sense of place. Light pervades the world, and when it is not light, darkness emerges and is combated by electric illumination. The perception of luminous and gloomy space is a key existential dimension of living in the world, of the experience of space and time. Though patterns and rhythms of light and dark play out differently according to geography, all sighted people directly perceive, sense, and make meaning of the world in accordance with its quali­ties of luminosity or murkiness. Despite this shared, all-­pervasive human experience in which spaces appear radically different according to time, season, and weather, social science investigation of daylight, darkness, and illumination is meager. This dearth is startling when we consider how meanings are attributed to the luminous and dim qualities of place, how sunlight and shadow condition the appearance of the landscape, influence the cultural vii

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values attributed to darkness and light, and inform the different social practices that are aligned with nightfall, dawn, and midday, for instance. While there are several excellent historical accounts about the rise of illumination and the changing historical uses and meanings of darkness, and a few accounts of the relationship between light and art, and film studies has long discussed the salience of lighting conditions to cinema, in geography (my own subject) daylight, gloom, and illumination have rarely been explored. This is extraordinary when we consider that the key objects of geographical analysis, space, place, and landscape, are thoroughly shaped by the light or darkness that suffuses them. It is as if these geographical entities were, by default, conceived as being washed in a neutral daylight rather than being dynamically conditioned by vital light and dark. The distinctions between light and dark utterly transform space, yet the advent of electric light is an ordinary miracle that we no longer acknowledge. In 2001 a clamor of indignation arose when Britain’s highest-­profile arts award, the Turner Prize, went to Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. The prize, critics complained, rewarded work that lacked any substance or skill other than an ability to outrage the public. However, another interpretation focuses on how the work, an empty white room in which a light is turned off and on every five seconds, brings out the sheer sensory distinction between illuminated and unilluminated space, revealing how electric light utterly transforms how a room is perceived and apprehended. In this book, I explore this ignored dimension of everyday life, along with the more spectacular transformations and characteristics bestowed by light and dark. This book explores how we might think about geographies of daylight, artificial illumination, and darkness. To examine the complex configurations through which these geographies have been conceptualized, experienced, and practiced across time and space, I draw on disparate theoretical perspectives. Yet though the overriding focus is on the geographies of light and dark, it is necessary to draw on other disciplinary perspectives and examples, especially because so little has been written on these subjects. Crucial to my study is an awareness that light and dark have been deployed, understood, and sensed in diverse ways in different historical eras and contexts, and therefore possess none of the eternal, essential qualities often attributed to them. By drawing on previous studies, I underpin a central contention that such praxes emerge out of distinctive historical conditions, are invariably contested, and are supplemented with alternative subaltern meanings and practices. I have also found it indispensable to explore

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various artistic engagements with darkness and light, revealing a medley of insights that makes us attentive to differing qualities, perceptions, and conceptions. By drawing on scholarly depictions of these works and on my own interpretations, I use these artworks to augment and underline several key assertions. In addition, much of the discussion relies on my own autoethnography, participant observation, and interviews, empirical explorations that exemplify arguments. I also rely on archaeological, architectural, and philosophical sources in composing the account. This breadth means that certain chapters contain extensive reviews of pertinent literature, while others focus more on empirical studies; both inform the broader arguments that I make. I cannot claim to have produced an exhaustive account but hope that the work constitutes a firm basis for further study and acts as a provocative incitement to advance theories of light and dark. Six key themes resonate throughout the book. First, light and dark are ubiquitous: they shape our everyday worlds. They influence the unnoticed perceptions and sensations that inform our lay knowledge of everyday space and influence the rhythms by which we organize individual routines and collectively synchronize our activities. These habitual dimensions of life are difficult to identify precisely because they are largely experienced unreflexively, but they anchor us in place, conditioning how we feel, practice, and conceive of our quotidian environments. Second, light and dark are saturated with cultural values and understandings, from the cosmological to the moral, symbolic meanings that signify an abundance of different qualities. These understandings are contested and change over time and space. As ever-­present qualities, light and dark are integral environmental and material resources with which we make sense of the world. Since they are always enmeshed within these popu­lar significations, there is little purchase in essentializing their qualities. Third, the ways in which we see with light and dark also cannot be essentialized, though perception seems “natural” to us: the senses do not provide unmediated access to the world but are conditioned by the distinctly human attributes of vision. These mechanics of seeing diverge widely from those of nonhumans in multiple ways. Though what we see is enabled and constrained by our visual apparatus, the senses are also culturally informed. We make sense of what we see according to culturally located values and meanings mentioned above. Fourth, it is essential to consider how light and dark have widely differing effects on distinctive places and landscapes, intermingling with their material and nonhuman qualities in complex ways. Geographical divergences

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in the distribution of light and dark during diurnal cycles, seasons, and weather conditions make a huge difference to how particular landscapes are experienced. Other key factors in shaping the apprehension of place include the intensity of light, the depth of darkness, and the qualities of the surfaces on which light reflects, deflects, and is absorbed. Fifth, this book is concerned with how humans deploy light and darkness to shape space and place, and abundant examples are provided throughout. Illumination is used to control, direct, and release bodies. Light designers illuminate diverse places to aestheticize surroundings, produce atmospheres, and add layers of symbolic meaning, but most commonly to organize the everyday functioning of places, rendering them legible and navigable. Illuminated installations charge space with festivity, and artists use light and dark to convey powerful impressions and meanings. Astronomers lobby for dark realms in which to view the starlit sky. Architects manipulate natural light and shadow to condition building interiors, and householders decorate their homes with lights that foster homely ambiences. Most of these spaces and place-­making practices are ordinary and unremarked on, but they underpin how illumination underlies the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004). Finally, it is crucial to regard light as signifying not merely meaning but what kindles feeling. The affective and emotional qualities of gloom and illumination are profound, and though partly informed by the cultural ways in which we interpret and sense space, the colors, intensities, and subtleties of light and shadow condition and chime with our moods. The atmospheres through which we continuously move are cooked by levels of darkness and light, foregrounding their more than representational attributes. These issues, among others, are addressed in the eight chapters that make up this book. The first two chapters are concerned with daylight, the next four focus on artificial illumination, and the final two concentrate on darkness. Chapter 1 considers how we perceive the landscape with sunlight. In moving away from passive, distant conceptions of the landscape as that which is visually beheld by a detached observer, I focus on how daylight circulates between the seer and the seen, facilitating vision and inflecting the landscape with colors, shades, and intensities. To foreground this imbrication of subject and object, I draw on artists who use light to interrogate issues of perception, questioning how we experience color, time, and landscape. Subsequently, I explore the different levels of light and the key role of the sky in contributing to the vital qualities of landscape and our distinc-

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tively human perceptual capacities. The chapter concludes by identifying how mythical, moral, and religious perspectives make conceptual sense of the play of sunlight, as well as considering diverse artistic attempts to represent light. Chapter 2 extends this analysis by exploring how daylight shapes apprehension and understanding of particular landscapes. I first discuss how our experience of light is typically unreflexive, since it occurs in the habitual, mundane settings of everyday space and time yet nevertheless is a key element of this familiar experience. I then examine how specific qualities of light foster a sense of place and inspire distinctive artistic representations and cultural practices of place. Finally, I consider the creative ways in which architects manipulate daylight to shape the sensuous, affective, and symbolic qualities of interior spaces. In chapter 3, I turn to artificial illumination. I discuss the radical transformation from an overwhelmingly gloomy experience of night to the pervasive spread of gas and electric lighting, a world to which we are now habituated. Yet though initially spellbinding, I contend that excessive, standardized, and low-­quality lighting is engendering a growing disenchantment with an overilluminated world. I explore the responses that this dissatisfaction is provoking from light designers, planners, artists, and consumers who are developing novel and inventive lighting practices that are reenchanting spaces and places. This focuses on four creative processes, namely, the development of more ecologically sustainable and responsive technologies, the deployment of varied forms of place-­specific lighting, the persistence of vernacular lighting, and the reclamation and reconsideration of lighting previously considered outmoded. In chapter 4, these optimistic tendencies are contrasted with a discus­ sion about how illumination continues to be used by various kinds of power. This underpins the central contention that lighting is inevitably surrounded by contesting cultural values and identities. In investigating the changing and multiple ways in which power is expressed and mobilized, I identify four key themes. First, I explore how lighting is used in surveilling, policing, and controlling space and people. Second, I investigate how illumination reveals and inscribes various kinds of inequality on space. Third, I discuss how cultural capital is mobilized to assert supposedly superior judgments around the aesthetic values of lighting. Fourth, I examine how the normative arrangements of illumination exemplifies the power to normalize the distribution of the sensible. To provide a snapshot of how

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contemporaneous power, resistance, and accommodation are expressed through lighting, the chapter concludes with a focus on the installation of a growing number of urban screens. Chapter 5 further considers the positive potentialities offered by the inventive deployment of illumination, investigating the creative works produced by artists and designers at light festivals. These proliferating events are emerging across the world at various scales, from local lantern parades to extensive spectacles. I begin with a discussion of how light festivals might be analyzed as neoliberal, empty spectacles, yet I argue that such assertions neglect how festive illumination can provide exciting, challenging experiences. More specifically, I identify four attributes of imaginative festive installations and projections. First, I discuss how illumination can defamiliarize space and place, productively disrupting social, sensual, and perceptual habits. Second, I focus on how particular light applications enhance a sense of place by conveying often overlooked historical and cultural attributes. Third, I look at how lighting installations invite a playful and convivial interactivity that transforms the habitual engagements of locals and visitors with places. Finally, I examine how festivals serve as temporary crucibles of experimentation by bringing together artists, technicians, and designers who share ideas and skills. Chapter 6 explores how light can contribute to atmosphere—­a quality that we may recognize but is difficult to pin down. Following a theoretical focus on how atmospheres might be conceived and the role that light can play in their formation, I discuss how lighting professionals design different kinds of atmospheres. I refer back to the consideration of light festivals to emphasize that atmospheres are not only produced by those who stage them but also by those who are caught up within them, who through their responses help shape the ongoing emergence of atmospheres. I subsequently examine how lighting is deployed by householders to condition the atmospheres in their homes in ways that reproduce shared practices or go beyond lighting conventions. Chapter 7 commences with a discussion about how darkness affected everyday life in an era before extensive illumination, focusing on the dangers it posed and how dominant Christian and Enlightenment conceptions foregrounded negative qualities. I then draw on historical and contemporary practices to exemplify how despite these negative connotations, darkness has always also been understood as replete with positive attributes. Indeed, nyctophobia has never been shared by all people; darkness has for-

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ever been subject to contesting, multivalent understandings. The contingent factors that produce these ambivalent responses are exemplified by a discussion of the variable responses to blackouts and a look at the contemporary lure of darkness as a response to conditions of excessive illumination. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the relationship between light and dark might be reconceptualized in a more-­nuanced, progressive fashion. Chapter 8 builds on the discussion in chapter 7 by confronting partial and total gloom at a variety of sites. In identifying the complex effects of darkness and the diverse sensations, affects, and social interactions it solicits, I explore walking through a crepuscular landscape, and driving, cycling, and running through gloomy space. I then investigate a tourist attraction, a restaurant, and a concert that are staged in complete darkness, and an art happening that initially appears to occur in a totally dark room. The exploration of these dark sites and events identifies how darkness stimulates visual and nonvisual sensations. Darkness also reconfigures social conviviality and intimacy, provides imaginative and conjectural encounters with space, and encourages greater openness toward difference. The controversies about the uses to which illumination is put and the revaluations of darkness discussed throughout this book signify that we are on the threshold of a new lighting revolution. Modernist taken-­for-­ granted practices and understandings that underpin the hitherto unquestioned imperative to bring forth civilization, banish ignorance, and marginalize deviancy by swamping nocturnal space with light suddenly seem somewhat quaint. Most evidently, the commonsense practice of washing cities in light throughout the night makes no ecological sense. Moreover, technical assertions that quantifiable measures of radiance, color, and distribution can determine the optimum provision of both daylight and illumination are being contested by qualitative, inventive, and idiosyncratic approaches to staging light. The proliferation of serial forms of lighting that render places homogeneous after dark is being challenged by place-­ specific illumination that takes account of historical, spatial, and cultural particularities, innovations that transform feeling and meaning through inventive design, temporary festive attractions, and durable art installations. As I have inferred above, darkness, which has typically been demonized as the antithesis of enlightenment, is now being reappraised as that which counteracts the overilluminated environments in which we dwell,

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sought out as a positive quality that recharges and challenges our senses. We are likely to live in environments marked by chiaroscuro, in a future characterized by shadow and gloom as well as judicious illumination. This momentum toward a more subtly illuminated future, toward a far from brighter tomorrow, is being propelled by light designers, ecologists, planners, architects, city marketers, and politicians. And it is being accompanied by a sudden scholarly awareness that light, dark, and illumination, topics until now largely neglected by academics, provide a vast area for research and theory. It is my fervent hope that this book will both capture the progressive movement toward a more sustainable, diverse, and aesthetically innovative lightscape and provide a point of embarcation and an incentive to further intellectual explorations of daylight, illumination, and darkness. Let there be light—­but let it be of good quality, and let it not be excessive. And let there be dark.



Part I Light

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Chapter 1

Seeing with Landscape, Seeing with  Light

F o r s ig h t e d p e o p l e , light shapes how they perceive, interpret, and operate in the visible world. It is the medium with which they continuously adapt, adjusting to qualities of brilliance, color, intensity, radiance, shade, and gloom. Despite this centrality to human experience, however, light is a form of radiant energy that is perceived less in itself than through how it reflects, deflects, or is absorbed by the features and surfaces with which it comes into contact and how our perceptual apparatus enables us to perceive these phenomena. Thus the objects that we see possess varying hues and intensities produced by the light that shines on them. Light is mediated by various substances in the material world: being diffused by translucent clouds, shining through transparent windows, reflecting off water, and being absorbed by most other things, including the pigment cells of plants that enable photosynthesis. However, our perception of these effects depends on our distinctly human visual capacities. In comparison with other animals, less light enters our eyes, and we are able to discern only parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, yet we can perceive details under gloomy conditions better than most other nonhuman creatures. The entanglement of light and perception foregrounds the circulation between the supposedly external and internal. Vision is facilitated when the eye’s convex lens focuses light to produce an inverted image of a scene on the retina. The iris expands and contracts in controlling the amount of light admitted. The image is sent via the optic nerve to the brain, which processes this information. Crucially, the brain controls selection of the infinite elements in the field of view. The light-­sensitive receptors on the retina are of two kinds, cones and rods, and these respond to different wavelengths of light and consequently produce two different modalities of vision. The cones function when the eye has adapted to normal levels of (day)light, 3

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allowing the experience of a color spectrum, whereas the rods operate when there are low levels of light, and lack the ability to discern color. This chapter explores how we perceive the landscape with light and how this facilitates our engagement with it, practically but also in how we understand and evaluate space. It is rather extraordinary that in geography and other disciplines, the key role of light in theorizing landscape has been almost entirely neglected. Older, post-­structuralist studies focus on symbolic qualities, reading the landscape as a text replete with power, cultural meanings, and history; they rarely consider the symbolic role of light, although painters have for centuries endeavored to capture the (changing) light that falls across the landscape (Cosgrove 1984; Mitchell 1994). Such studies generally explore only how the landscape is read as a cultural artifact, not how it is seen or, indeed, how qualities of light are interpreted and evaluated. Even in those works in which geographers focus on vision, light gets little mention (Daniels 1993). More recent studies that adopt a nonrepresentational and phenomenological focus and swerve away from this culturalist bias also only cursorily consider how light is central to embodied experience, how it is that with which we see the landscape (Bender and Winer 2001; Wylie 2007). I redress this theoretical lacuna by discussing how daylight is an integral element of the vital landscape and how perceiving with the light that falls on landscape involves continuous attunement. I emphasize the temporal qualities of perception and show how seeing with light is always entangled with cultural conventions, refuting any suggestion that the landscapes possess any essence or can be objectively discerned by a detached observer. To initiate an examination of the specific ways in which humans perceive with and interpret light, I discuss two artworks that reveal our visual particularities. This discussion undercuts any suggestion that the ways in which we see with light provides unmediated access to the reality of the world. First, I explore the visual experience and interpretation of color in an encounter with Carlos Cruz-­Diez’s Chromosaturation, and second, I investigate the transformative effects on vision perpetrated by Olafur Eliasson’s manipulation of light and water in Model for a Timeless Garden, and how this interrogates aesthetic conventions. As Diana Young (2006, 173) submits, colors “animate things in a variety of ways, evoking space, emitting brilliance, endowing things with an aura of energy or light” and can be combined to “create a medley of affective and sensual impressions, camouflage objects, and produce synaesthetic effects.” Cruz-­Diez (2009, 134), a Venezuelan artist, presents color

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as “a situation happening in space,” focusing on color, aesthetics, and perception, eschewing any representational context to explore the viewer’s emotional and perceptual responses. Chromosaturation, featured at the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show in 2013 in London, consists of three large, interconnected chambers, each suffused with a monochrome hue, purely blue, green, and red light courtesy of fluorescent tube lights with colored filters. The experience of such singular saturated colors is entirely unfamiliar, for we are unused to perceiving settings in which only one color exists, most spaces being composed out of multiple shades and hues. Here, color assumes a solid materiality as it fills the bare rooms. Visitors are immersed in a single, luminous, three-­dimensional color field in which floor, walls, and ceiling meld in one pulsating, all-­encompassing hue that pervades all scales of visual apprehension. Accordingly, in these unstructured, undifferentiated color fields, the eye is troubled, finding it difficult to focus on anything while also straining from the glare. The retina is especially shocked when it moves into a chamber of a different color from the one left behind. This utter unfamiliarity with the spaces in Chromosaturation causes the visual system to adapt involuntarily: after several seconds of blinking at the overwhelming monochrome, the room slowly turns a paler version of red, blue, or green—­to pink, sky blue, or light green. At first, the impression is that this transformation in the light is being manipulated; however, it is the observer who is moderating the color in order to see with it more comfortably. Disconcertingly, no matter how hard one may concentrate, it proves impossible to prevent this visual adaptation. Following this mental, ocular adjustment, a movement from one room to another once more repeats the sensation of being enveloped by an overwhelming hue, whereupon the visual system again amends perception and modifies the color. The work thus makes us vividly aware of the processes through which we receive light and interpret the color that we experience. If our perceptual apparatus is able to change what colors we experience at firsthand, then what in our vision is reliable? Can we be sure that what we are seeing is the “right” color, or is our brain playing tricks on us? In destabilizing our sense of color perception, Cruz-­Diez challenges the unreflexive ways in which we apprehend the world and foregrounds the particular human qualities of vision. For our perception of color does not constitute an objective recognition of what is out there; it is a subjective process through which the brain makes sense of the stimuli produced by light as it enters the eye and reacts with various kinds of cone cells. Apprehension of color, then, is forged through the relationship between living

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creatures and their environments; for humans specifically, through our relationship to light and the things that it animates for us. Colors do not exist independently but “are relational, rather than intrinsic,” a product of both the electromagnetic spectrum and visual perception (Beveridge 2000, 312). Crucially, humans see colors differently from each other. This is most obviously the case with the color-­blind but also for those who dwell in particular environments that shape subjective color perception. Moreover, the same color next to other colors can appear dissimilar, and the appearance of a color can vary according to the hue of its background. Chromosaturation reminds us that as well as seeing the world through symbolic and cognitive meanings, this partial experience of color draws attention to the particularities of human vision. Although they cannot be sure, color scientists suggest that cats and dogs are unable to distinguish as broad a spectrum of colors as humans, while fish and reptiles can probably see a greater range of hues, and many nocturnal creatures have little need of color vision. The sensual and perceptual life of the dog, bird, or insect is beyond our comprehension, for even if we can manage to understand the mechanics of animal optics, we cannot know how an animal’s visual apparatus interprets what it sees. The illusionary and destabilizing effects on vision offered up by Cruz-­ Diez chime with the work of op artists such as Bridget Riley, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Victor Vasarely. According to Simon Rycroft, these artists deploy light in ways that resonate with contemporary concerns to foreground the vitality of the material world, a key issue in considering how we see landscape with light. Like Cruz-­Diez, these artists move away from representational forms: for them, “ideas and relationships figure more prominently than schematic representations of nature and landscape” (Rycroft 2012, 455). In exploring fields of dynamic energies and their effects on perception, Rycroft considers how the meanings and feelings of such pieces emerged “in the space-­time between and in conjunction with the embodied viewer-­participant and were at once a psychic, physical and haptic experience” (456). In Chromosaturation, the experience of light and color similarly foregrounds their dynamic qualities and how these energies interact with our own vital responses, producing physical responses to the overwhelming color saturation and subsequent adaptation. This foregrounds the temporalities through which we see and through which light continu­ ously changes. As Cruz-­Diez (2009, 11–­15) asserts, the perception of color “highlights space, ambiguousness and ephemeral and unstable conditions” that is “conditioned to the fortuitous circumstances of light.” The

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light that generates color perception endlessly fluctuates, while vision, too, is an emergent capacity. Accordingly, the color and light we encounter are continuously subject to reattunement and temporal effects such as retinal fatigue, vibration, and afterimage. Color is thus a continuously changing event, and Chromosaturation works through this unfolding process. Rycroft (2005, 355) also considers how the op art of the 1960s was “a generator of perceptual responses, possessing a dynamic quality which provoked illusory images and sensations in the spectator, thus bringing into doubt the ‘normal processes of seeing’ ” and focusing attention on the perceptual capacities of human vision. As Young (2006, 174) contends, purely scientific conceptions that construe the experience of color as a mechanical or psychological response and regard colors as purely objective qualities eschew “the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger, and hence the expressive potential that colours possess.” Responses to color are also invariably loaded with symbolic meanings that vary across cultures. Even though there are no obvious representational elements in the work, nothing to evoke any evident meaning, Chromosaturation provokes emotional and affective responses. The vibrant colors evoke different, indescribable moods as they suffuse vision and tint skin and clothes. As Tim Ingold (2016, 229) avers, “As a phenomenon of light, colour lends a particular affectivity to the sensible world: an aura that overwhelms the consciousness of those who come under its influence.” The red, green, and blue experienced in these separate chambers solicit diverse moods in their initially vibrant state, and in their altered, paler version. Blue may be associated with melancholy, green with arboreal calmness, and red with passion or the sacred. Whatever the individual responses to these colors, evident in how some visitors recoil from certain hues and linger in particular chambers, the work underscores how the ongoing perception of light in the world is entangled with affect and emotion. Like Cruz-­Diez, Eliasson is concerned with dematerializing the art object by deploying light, water, or mist and diffusing these elements in space to explore the perception of the onlooker. He also enjoins us to question how we perceive, intervening in our usual unreflexive sensing of the world by diverging from the conventions through and by which we see, thereby revealing the norms of vision. His compelling Model for a Timeless Garden (2011) was also part of the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show, but solicited a different range of ideas about sensation and light, and possessed a different affective charge than Chromosaturation. Visitors walk into an otherwise dark room to see a long table at waist height supporting twenty-­seven small

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fountains of varying flow and height, a strobe light pulsing to freeze-­frame them. The water, usually experienced as continuous flow under ordinary light conditions, is radically transformed into lines of movement composed of diamonds and jewels, suspended in midflow, facilitating a unique perception of water beyond the usual human visual capacities. As the artist explains, the effect is to “freeze something that usually our eye and brain would see in motion, so the film through which we see the world is cut into small sections” (quoted in Phaidon 2013). This dissection of the visual world into discrete moments by the strobe seems especially peculiar because the continuous flow of its sound is not matched by the usual visual apprehension of running water, juxtaposing different sensory apprehensions of the same thing. This auditory-­visual mismatch draws attention to how we see according to the temporal constraints imposed by our visual system. As Roy Sorensen (2004) details, when we watch a movie, anything below a speed of sixteen frames per second can cause the apprehension of flashing images rather than a continuous flow. The low threshold of visual persistence among humans means that we can see a film—­usually operated at twenty-­four frames a second—­as a continuous flow, although other animals, such as a bee, would perceive the separateness of each frame. Likewise, the twenty-­ four frames per second would appear like a slide presentation to a pigeon, which would require at least seventy-­five frames per second to create the illusion of movement on-­screen. The thirteenth-­century Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher Dōgen expounded on how “seeing mountains and waters has differences depending on the species. That is to say, there are those who see water as jewel necklaces . . . their jewel necklaces we see as water. There are those who see water as beautiful flowers” (quoted in Saito 2008, 158). The unfamiliar perception of flowing water created through the deployment of light in Timeless Garden might similarly cause us to question how other creatures visually perceive water—­whether they apprehend it as an ongoing flow as we do or can perceive the separate drops made evident in Eliasson’s display. The hushed gasps and exclamations of visitors entering the room captures their stunned response to the diverse formations produced by the intermittently arrested flow of water. The flashing light, the dark setting, and the mesmerizing fountains induce quiet, a focused absorption, and slower physical movements that collectively constitute a shared multi­ sensual space. In encountering Timeless Garden, we wonder whether other visitors are seeing the fountains as we see them. Viewing the work is thus

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Figure 1. Olafur Eliasson: Model for a Timeless Garden, part of The Light Show, Hayward Gallery, London, 2011. Strobe lights freeze the flow of water, providing an impression of jewels. In transforming the usual visual experience of moving water, the work foregrounds awareness of the specific ways in which humans perceive with light. Photograph taken by and courtesy of Elettra Bordonaro.

an irreducibly social experience, and sharing in the glee decenters the self from the experience, yet all the same, we try to make sense of our own perception. Through producing an experience in which our expectations based on our previous perceptual experience are confounded, Eliasson’s installation suggests that the boundary between reality and illusion is less clear than  we envisage. He also reveals the limits and partiality of our vision. Yet the work also offers an alternative way to visually perceive the world, a way to see that might be akin to that of another creature. As Madeleine Grynsztejn (2007, 17) writes, “In promoting a kind of awareness of conventions of seeing, Eliasson’s work encourages a critical attitude toward normative processes of perception while at the same time offering viewers opportunities to expand their ability to envision.” The collective absorption of onlookers, transfixed as they gaze on the frozen droplets, also addresses the cultural values that are inevitably part

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of the experience of light. The elements that Eliasson uses in his art—­ light, air, and water—­are those that contribute to a sense of the sublime, for instance, in landscape painting and nature tourism. These elements are reassembled in the gallery and act to produce a scene charged with mystery and magic. In Timeless Garden, light perhaps evokes the effects that render one mesmerized by a glittering waterfall or bubbling stream, the bright shimmer of sunlight on a body of water or the burst of rays through a dark cloud. Yet as with most of Eliasson’s work, there is no attempt to camouflage the techniques by which light is rendered sublime, for visitors can clearly see the working of the strobe light and the mechanically induced fountains, unlike the occurrences of the sublime in the “natural” world. Eliasson’s recontextualizations of natural elements to create rainbows, suns, fountains, and mists confuse us about our conventional appre­ hensions and representations of nature, for even though these elements are staged through evident technological means, the power of the work is not diminished and the sublime can nonetheless be experienced. Accordingly, besides spellbinding visitors with light and water, the artist also succeeds in soliciting an awareness about how we construe symbolic meanings in response to these effects. Seeing the Vital Landscape with Light In discussing these two works of art, I have identified several aspects of perceiving landscape with light that introduce some key issues. I have emphasized the temporality of vision and how we use the shifting availability of light to continuously become attuned to space, movement, and color. I have exemplified the specific aptitudes and constraints of our visual system that provide a highly partial way of seeing with light. And I have inferred that vision is always inextricably entangled with the cultural and historical conventions through which we interpret what we see. A further issue that emerges through the above discussion concerns the ways in which light circulates between the interior and exterior, blurring the division between seer and seen, between viewing subject and object perceived. This lack of separation between internal and external is inferred by John Wylie (2006), who insists that landscape constitutes neither object nor subject but blends distinctions between the looked on and the onlooker. As we apprehend landscape, we are immersed in the currents and energies of a world-­in-­formation. Plunged into light, weather, and earthliness, any sense that we are embodied entities separate from the landscape is deceptive, despite the persistence of conventions of cultural representa-

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tion and the persistent norms about how to look on landscape and assess, understand, and characterize it. Both human bodies and landscapes continuously emerge, partly through their continuous interaction with each other (Morris 2011). As creatures within this unfolding world, landscape thus constitutes “the materialities and sensibilities with which we see” and sense in nonvisual ways (Rose and Wylie 2006, 478). Rather than consider landscape through an outmoded “static pictorialism,” we see with the light that falls on the landscape and circulates through our visual system (Saito 2008). We see with the landscape as part of our habituated way of being in place, and we see with the ever-­changing light that falls on the landscape. A focus on the dynamism of light in the landscape foregrounds one aspect of the ways in which landscapes are never preformed but are “always in process . . . tensioned, always in movement, always in making,” vitally immanent and emergent (Bender 2001, 3; see also Wylie 2007; Benedicktsen and Lund 2010). Landscape is alive with energies, eternally fluid, its rocks, earth, vegetation, and climate continually undergoing change, as elements from near and far are entangled and folded together in a continual making. Rather than static notions that suggest intrinsic being and permanence, landscape seethes with multiple rhythms and temporalities, as elements within it are continuously becoming, emerging, dying, and transforming (Edensor 2011). The limitations of our sensorium mean that humans can perceive but a fraction of these emergent processes: microbial and micro-­chemical interactions in the air and water, within the insides of living things and underground, are imperceptible, and many processes take place too slowly for us to perceive, though we may acknowledge the outcomes. As John Daniel (2008, 28) notes, “The real action” takes place in “the vast sectors of the unseen.” In a forest these invisible multiple agencies include “the miles of fungal filaments in any ounce or two of forest soil, the prodigious traffic of food and fluids travelling the xylem and phloem of trees, the manifold borings and chewings and excretings of countless hidden insects” (28), the activities of bacteria, the seepage of groundwater, and tectonic uplift. Light plays a crucial part in this unseen vitality, as it triggers chlorophyll and causes plants to take in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Water is drawn up by the sun through the capillary tubes of trees and descends back to earth, as the “breath of the forest” reverses and “a myriad of beings” consume oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide (Kimmerer 2008, 170). We see the outcomes of the energy bestowed on the Earth by living things that grow or withdraw when the light is plentiful, in the greening of the world in spring

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as photosynthesis accelerates, and in the flowers that bloom as the sun’s rays hit the Earth and in other plants that seek shadowy places away from glare. A look at the shape of the trees in a wood reveals that each negotiates an individual path as it grows to establish a position where it can obtain the greatest quantity of light. Yet though light is central to life on Earth, other creatures and plants prosper in the dark, for the nocturnal landscape also seethes with life, as animals come out to hunt or move out of the lairs from which they have escaped becoming daylight prey. Indeed, darkness is a requirement for growth and sustenance for living things. And in the dark, certain creatures generate their own forms of light through bioluminescence, such as deep-­sea fish, glow worms, and fireflies. This light-­induced dynamism contributes to how never-­quiescent landscapes “coalesce and disassemble into different arrangements,” an endless transition that invariably produces “a temporally and spatially textured mosaic” that testifies to different continuities and durabilities as well as volatile becomings and short-­lived events (van Dyke 2013, 408–­9). Strikingly, however, despite this emergent vitality, we largely continue to make sense of landscape by identifying the look of the land, its shape and form, instead of focusing on its “substance,” its textures and its feel, qualities that herald its liveliness (Ingold 2011, 133). We can hear the vitality of the landscape in the breezes and raindrops that assail our faces, the sounds of water and wind, and the smells of decay and growth, yet the most evident agent of vitality is light that pervades the land and sky. The temporal flow of seeing that responds to the ever-­changing light that falls on the landscape foregrounds our perception of these vital qualities, yet despite this, the reification of particular landscapes persists in popular cultural representations and understandings. The most immediate evidence of the vitality of the light and landscape is in the changing hue and quality of the “sky-­in-­formation.” This dynamic, ever-­changing play of light follows different temporalities (Ingold 2011). These can be momentary, as when clouds scud across the sky and the tones of the landscape swiftly oscillate or unsettled weather produces vibrant fluctuations between brightness and shade. They more predictably accord with the diurnal passage of the Earth as the golden hour of dawn initiates daylight and the blue hour of twilight heralds its end, or follow seasonal variations throughout the year, most dramatically at the poles, where there are starkly contrasting variations between the pervasive light of summer and the enveloping gloom of winter. In discussing visual perception, Alphonso Lingis (1998) identifies how

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changing “levels” of light, characterized by depth of field and brightness, continuously play across space, forming a realm in which we see things and with which we continuously adjust. When we walk out into the morning, the light may encompass an expanse of landscape that makes us blink, but as we become attuned to the brightness, this luminosity conditions how we see. These inflections of tone, shade, and intensity draw us in, luring our gaze toward particular colors, patches of light or areas of shadow, and this continually diverges as shifting patterns of light and dark trigger (re)attune­ ment, subsequently focusing visual attention toward other objects. Lingis uses the example of a red rose in a hospital room to display its chromatic relationality, how it plays across the space texturally and in its hues, intensifying the whites of the sheets and greens of leaves, and drawing the gaze toward it. Light thus engenders continuous attunement, provoking affective and emotional resonances in the sensing body, cajoling it into movement, activating passions, instigating sensual pleasures and discomforts. In the vital landscape, light brings into play everything it touches, sporadically reorganizing the relationships between things. Consider a verdant hedge snaking across a hilly pastoral scene. Depending on the levels of the light with which we see, this may form a singular black line at twilight, a rich linear sequence of multiple hues of green in the afternoon sun, or cast a thick, spreading shadow as the sun sets. In a similar fashion to Lingis, Gernot Böhme (1993, 121) uses the shadow of a blue cup to contend that this does not simply spread darkness across space but also spreads blueness, calling the process whereby objects tincture each other “ecstatic.” The ways in which a thing casts its color or dapples of light on surrounding surfaces and other objects specifies in more detail how levels of light produce reconfigured relationships across space, effects to which we respond and become attuned. This draws attention to another quality of landscapes in blurring the divisions between things. The landscape contains innumerable material entities, and the vital dynamism that inheres in all space is always liable to break the distinctions between these apparently discrete things over multiple timescales. Rocks crumble to dust, water evaporates into air, and plants decay into the soil. Similarly, the effects of light on things can reconfigure their relationships so that they cast their color and light across each other, gather in the color of other things, or become subsumed within a field of shade, brilliant glare, or color (see Bille and Sørensen, in press). Two further characteristics of seeing with landscape and light must also be acknowledged. First, it is crucial to recognize that vision is invariably entangled with nonvisual apprehension, for instance, through a tactile

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gaze that provokes intimations of texture and temperature without directly sensing them. Cathryn Vasseleau (1998, 13) insists that “tactility is an essential aspect of light’s texture . . . to the feeling of a fabric to the touch, or the grasping of its qualities.” Thus when confronting a landscape, a haptic or tactile vision continuously emerges, offering the potential for engaging with what we see through touch (Marks 2002). Whether nearby or far away, we imaginatively throw ourselves out into scenes that through sight we are able to empathetically connect with, through memories of textures, shades, forms, and surfaces that were once sensed haptically and kinesthetically. Second, Wylie (2006) foregrounds depth as an existential condition for our visual apprehension of the world, providing another facet of the light with which we see. A sense of depth shapes the distinctive planes, angles, and densities that facilitate the experience of differentiation within the landscape. Accordingly, seeing with the landscape involves different modes of looking within shifting fields of varying depth—­as we alternately gaze on vistas, attend to obstacles in our path, glaze over in distraction, or scrutinize nearby details, as scenes unfold incessantly, and as light levels change and bodies attune. In exemplifying the shifting ways in which we encounter light in terms of its changing levels and fields of varying depth, Lingis details how he comes across lichens in a wood. He engages with this micro-­landscape as light levels shift and depth varies by continuously reattuning to the scene, his gaze successively homing in on and moving away from the lichens and the bejewelled dewdrops that rest on them (Lingis 1998, 12). To explore further the ways in which levels of light and encounters with varying depths produce distinctive experiences of landscape, I describe a walk I undertook in the midst of the Gargunnock Hills, west of Stirling, Scotland. Few people come to the Hole of Sneath. Precipitous, dank, moss-­covered sandstone cliffs block off the sunlight in the gorge, closing in to the point where a forty-­foot waterfall plunges into a deep green pool of indeterminate depth into which little light penetrates. The stream surges out from the pool, cascading through the carved rock channel and sparkling in places where overhanging trees thin out. Walking out of the gloom through thick leaf mold up the dappled slopes, shards of sunlight occasionally blind me and shine on the smooth, gray bark of the stately beech trees and the almost fluorescent green of moss and ferns. My gaze is suddenly drawn to a spider web a few inches away, rendered translucent by a sharp beam. Soon the trees peter out, and after battling through the bracken, I reach the top of the slope, and a few feet farther on join the rough, single-­track road that

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leads to the Inch of Leckie, which affords expansive views across the Carse of Forth to the north. The sky is interspersed with cumulus clouds that patch the landscape with slow-­moving blotches of dark and lighter green, and periodically dull and brighten yellowish-­brown stretches of peat bog. It is a late spring afternoon, and the sun has begun its descent, the shadows of trees and hedges stretching across the valley floor. Thick stands of conifers absorb light, forming dense, impervious blocks of dark green while vibrant yellow gorse dominates areas of the landscape when struck by the sun’s rays. Beyond the carse is a receding array of mountains; those in the foreground are green and yellow, while those farther away are blue and gray in tone, some with bluish-­white snow-­covered peaks. Behind me, the sun suddenly disappears behind a cloud, and colors mute in the near distance, but a shaft of sunlight surges through a break, highlighting a spot of dead bracken on the mountainside in vivid reddish-­brown hues. The sun returns as it sinks, its angle to the land becoming progressively more acute, and the textures of the slopes of the north-­facing Gargunnock Hills that recently appeared smooth are now accentuated by shadow, ridges, and contours, with trees, rocks, and walls standing out. From the setting sun to the east, the trees are brightly illuminated, and their texture and color are acutely presented, but to the west they form ink-­black silhouettes against the dark blue sky. Suddenly, seemingly in response to this late sunburst, a medley of sheep, crow, and lapwing cries mingle with the bubbling song of the curlew and the melody of the skylark, focusing attention on sound. Below, on the carse, the snaking River Forth glistens in the late burst of sunlight, winds creating rippling pools across its blue-­gray surface. A pale moon becomes noticeable in the darkening blue of the sky, and the first few stars appear. Time to head home. This vignette exemplifies how our attention is successively captured by the myriad effects of light in the landscape, coercing the gaze to move between different distances and depths, areas of clarity and murk, colors and intensities, and realms of movement and stillness. The affordances of the particular landscape are integral to the multifarious effects wrought by the variegated play of light, and different visual experiences emerge according to the refraction, reflection, or absorption of light by distinctive gradients, volumes, planes, and textures. In referring to the bird cries that seemed to respond to the light, I also foreground how the cocon­stitutive emergence of landscape and human subject is not merely enmeshed in visual apprehension but resonates in multiple auditory, tactile, haptic, and olfactory sensations. Temperature, wind, the sounds of rivers and streams,

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Figure 2. The Hole of Sneath, Gargunnock Hills, Scotland, is the starting point for a walk through which various levels of light are experienced that continuously transform the landscape traversed and walked through. Photograph by and courtesy of Jack Croft.

and levels of moisture contribute to multisensory engagements that also entangle the body in landscape. For instance, a bright level of light may also be apprehended as warmth, causing the eyes to squint and the skin to color while soliciting the body to move or luxuriate, and can instigate a sense of alienation or belonging to the landscape. Ways of looking and seeing with light can also inform the design of landscape to produce particular effects, as Böhme (1993) exemplifies in discussing how daylight is orchestrated in landscape gardening practices that “tune” space by managing the levels of light that filter through woodland canopies. Thus far, I have drawn attention to the fluid, vital, and processual qualities of the landscape. I have focused on how this ongoing emergence includes the endless play of light and the ways in which humans, as part of the landscape, respond to these unfolding conditions, continually becoming attuned to the changing visual scenes that they move through and toward. We react to the changing space beheld, to the circulation of light between inside and outside, and respond to a host of other factors that dis-

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tract vision, tire or strain the eyes, produce optical effects, change mood, alter levels of physical energy, and involve modes of moving. Accordingly, seeing with light is irrevocably temporal. To conclude this section, and reinforce the specificity of how we see with light, I consider how this diverges from other creatures and varies among humans. In the discussion of Chromosaturation and Model for a Timeless Garden, I foreground the specificities of human visual apprehension and how this conditions our perception of light’s multiple effects on the landscape. We respond to the brightness, shadows, and colors of the features we see, while the stereoscopic facility offered by two eyes conveys information about the size and position of elements in the landscape, as well as its depth. Another key dimension of human vision is that we scan and focus when encountering a landscape, and our eye “does not look at things but roams among them, finding a way through rather than aiming for a fixed target” (Ingold 2011, 132). I have also emphasized that the visual apparatus of other creatures means that their ways of seeing are shaped by different foci. This is essential when underlining the specificity of human vision and its influence on our understanding of the world. Unlike the ways in which we cast our gaze over the landscape, some animals adopt a panoramic look, while others focus intensely on discrete elements. For humans, the visual availability of elements in the landscape is conditioned by a limited visible spectrum, whereas many birds are able to see with ultraviolet light. This allows them to distinguish patterns on plumage invisible to humans; in the case of kestrels, ultraviolet light is reflected off the scent marks manifest in the urine and feces of small rodents. Because of the higher quantity of light receptors in their retina, most birds of prey are able to discern prey from a distance that seems inconceivable to humans. Contrastingly, vampire bats are able to see the infrared radiation of blood in their prey. Other birds possess specialist photoreceptors that can detect polarized light caused by the Earth’s magnetic field, assisting in directional perception during migration. On the other hand, human apprehension of color is thought to be more acute than that of dogs and cats. We can only speculate about the radical alterity of how nonhuman animals see with light and the landscape—­consider the impossibility of comprehending the effects of the fly’s compound eye. Even if we reach some understanding about the mechanics of vision, it is impossible to guess how this interacts with an animal’s brain to produce the experience and interpretation of what is beheld. Yet in acknowledging this otherness, we can also never be certain that other humans perceive a scene as we do. Of

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course, visual capacities and capabilities vary among humans, but crucially, the perception of the landscape is shaped by humans’ entangled visual and mental capacities, and by the cultures of looking in which they live. As Hannah Macpherson (2009, 1049) asserts, “Neither the sighted nor the visually impaired simply see ‘what is there’; rather, everybody’s seeing involves movement, intention, memory, and imagination,” attributes that vary enormously across space and time. Seeing with the Light of the Sky The descriptive passage above about my Scottish walk also draws attention to the vitality and inseparability of the sky from the landscape. Yet the very word landscape seems to exclude the celestial, focusing on what is of the Earth, the landforms, contours and configurations, geomorphologies, natu­ral histories, cultural inscriptions, and distinctive features of particular kinds of terra firma, perpetuating a spatial “horizontalism” (Graham and Hewitt 2013). By contrast, elements such as light, dark, sunsets, wind, rain, clouds, and fog have been ontologically conceived as the immaterial opposite of the concrete, material earthliness of the land, around and above which they swirl and float. The apparently more stable features of the Earth thus appear to contrast with the more evanescent qualities of the sky, although as I have emphasized, such understandings overlook the dynamic state of flux in which all aspects of the landscape are part of a world-­in-­formation. Distinguishing between material and earthly, and immaterial and celestial, elements is to mask how landscape is a fluid and emergent indivisible field. Crucially, the land is not “an interface” separating earth and sky but is a “vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermingling” in which medium and substance blend, as they do also in the human body (Ingold 2011, 119). Most obviously, air and water penetrate the Earth, and photosynthesis absorbs water and carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. Emphatically, then, the sky is wholly part of the landscape; though our vision informs us that it seems to be separate from the land, it casts its light on and materially intermixes with the land. To see the sky is to see a light that continuously enfolds and is enfolded into the world and provides the means through which we perceive it. Thus we move and mingle through the flux and phases of the medium of light as we do through admixtures of earth, water, and air. And we align ourselves with and respond to the celestial rhythms of sun, moon, and stars, to diurnal and nocturnal patterns of the day, to sunset and sunrise, to seasonal shifts in qualities and quantities of light, and to shifting patterns of weather.

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Light circulates through the sky as electromagnetic radiation, and though the sky often appears to be a transparent medium through which light passes, the sheer vitality of the air out of which it is composed is overlooked except on windy and cloudy occasions. In creative experiments using techniques to visualize the apparently invisible, intangible air that surrounds us, Malte Wagenfeld (2009) reveals that it is actually a vigorous, ever-­changing field of eddies, swirls, and pools that circulate around things and inside bodies in unpredictable, often local ways. As a complex assemblage of interrelated, interacting, and networked energies and forces, air also shapes the play of light, refracting and diffusing the sun’s rays through the sky. Not only is air necessary for us to breathe, but it is the medium through which light flows and sound is conducted. We thus see, hear, and smell with the air. As Ingold (2016, 225) insists, the sky is not empty but is “full of the material stuff of air . . . the very medium that makes perception possible.” To consider how we perceive with the light that drenches the landscape, I look at James Turrell’s Skyspace in Kielder Forest, Northumbria, the largest area of commercial woodland in England, installed as part of a program devised to attract tourists to the forest. Throughout his career, Turrell has focused on the multiple qualities of light. He sometimes investigates the properties of artificial illumination, but here, as in many other works, he explores the qualities and perception of daylight. Amid thick pine forest, Skyspace, a mile and a half from the nearest tarmacked road, takes the form of a broad, twenty-­foot-­high tower built out of local stone in which a passage leads to a circular chamber. A concrete bench surrounds the chamber’s circumference, and a circle of small, dark pebbles covers most of its floor area. An eight-­foot lower wall painted gray and rising at an outward angle is detached from the wall like a thick skin, and above this, another wall reaches to the ceiling at an angle that leans toward the perpendicular. It joins the ceiling in which is cut a perfectly circular aperture with a sharp edge, open to the sky. The radiance of the sky, at all times of day, glaringly contrasts with the lower light levels in the interior and with the flat surface of the ceiling. The sheer luminosity of the color that occupies the sharp-­edged circular opening dominates the experience of being inside the structure, attracting a focus on the brilliant light, so vivid that it appears to constitute a solidity at variance with our usual apprehension that the sky is immaterial. The dominant presence of this concentrated light transforms our perception by isolating the medium with which we see. We are seeing only the light

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reflected and refracted through the sky that lies outside the cairn, but this becomes the focus of our attention, instead of constituting the medium with which we see everything else. Though the light of the sky is also the source of the interior illumination of the chamber, this is subservient to the brilliant luminosity of the changing colors seen though Skyspace. In directing a focused attention on the light of the sky, Turrell fosters an unfolding apprehension of those light effects that are “normally encrypted in the perceptual noise of the day-­to-­day and lost in the general disregard” (Adcock 1990, 206). In isolating it as an integral element of everyday experience, Turrell detaches the light in the sky from the general ambient array. Accordingly, as Craig Adcock asserts, Turrell’s light works are “so fundamentally integrated with perception that it becomes meaningless to separate the works from the physiological and psychological processes they disclose” (38). As he also emphasizes, seeing color and light in this way “seems to come directly inside the percipient’s own self-­awareness” (35). Thus the experience of Skyspace is coproduced by viewers and the disclosure to them of the agencies of light. As the quote by Turrell on the Forestry Commission website advertising the work articulates, “[My] work is not so much about my seeing as about your seeing. There is no-­one between you and your experience.” In addition, as Skyspace particularly reveals, daylight is always both physically and affectively charged. As Ingold (2016, 223) emphasizes, light “gets inside and saturates our consciousness to the extent that it is constitutive of our own capacity to see or feel . . . an affective mingling of our own awareness with the turbulence and pulsations of the medium in which we are immersed.” Turrell’s skyspaces also enjoin us to pay particular attention to the sky, and the landscape of which it is part. If visitors occupy the chamber for a lengthy spell, the continuous variations in colors and intensity of the sky’s light become apparent, changing according to the angle of the sun, the time of day, the season, and the prevailing weather conditions. Yet even under muted British weather conditions, whether flecked or thick with cloud, full of stars or midday blue, a succession of intense colors enchants the eyes and conditions the glow or gloom of the interior. As Georges Didi-­ Huberman (2001, 51) describes: The sky is no longer the neutral background of things to be seen, but the active field of an unforeseeable visual experience  .  .  . the sky is no longer vaguely “around” or “above” us, but exactly there, on top of us and against us, present because it is changing, obliging us to inhabit it, if not to rise up to meet it.

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Figure 3. Midafternoon, early December, James Turrell’s Skyspace, Kielder Forest. Turrell’s work solicits a focused attention on the light of the sky and on the ways in which we perceive the world with light. Photograph by the author.

By making the light appear material and close by, rather than extending in all directions to a great distance from us, Skyspace challenges us to focus more profoundly on the sky’s qualities and how it is an integral part of the landscape. As is evident from spending time in the chamber, the sky is neither homogeneous nor empty but swirls with currents that distribute light, color,

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wind, and cloud. This foregrounds how the sky has been neglected in conceptions of landscape (Ingold 2011). In the next chapter, I provide an account of how the light of the sky witnessed in Skyspace shaped the experience of the particular landscape of Kielder Forest on a late February afternoon. Cultures of Seeing Landscape with Light So far, I have focused on accounts that explore how humans perceive the landscape with light, drawing on and extending the ideas of Ingold, Wylie, and Lingis. However, an exclusive focus on these (post)phenomenological aspects crucially neglects the cultural and historical meanings through which we make sense of light. As I have already inferred, seeing with light combines perception and imagination: the interpretation of perceptual experience is invariably entangled with symbolic and cultural associations, and this is especially pertinent to the apprehension of landscape and the ways in which light falls on it. An overly abstract philosophical approach, as Chris van Dyke (2013, 401) asserts, can efface “the spatial and historical contingencies under which the landscape is produced,” and a focus on the individual observer “neglects the intersubjective construction of landscape.” Onlookers read the landscape according to particular historical contexts and cultural ways of looking, though in the immediacy of encounter, experience is not determined by these values, aesthetics, epistemologies, and practices, which, in any case, are continually emerging. To emphasize, ways of seeing and interpreting landscape depends on its material qualities, their interaction with light and our sensory experience, as well as being informed by intersubjective cultural understandings and values. For Mitch Rose (2006, 537), cultural interpretations of landscape are fueled by the imperative to transform “the vagaries and ramblings of meaning, attachment, and desire circulating in the landscape into sense—­that is, into something that can be envisioned, set before our mind’s eye, or imagined in a mental tableau.” Thus vision proceeds to envisioning, the articulation and representation of landscape as a knowable cultural text, resonating with symbolic meaning. The multiple play of light on the landscape thus “solicits and provokes, initiates and connects” onlookers into making sense of sensations (542). This melding of the perceptual and the symbolic can also stimulate emotional and affective responses, as the following passage by Rebecca Solnit (2005, 29) exemplifies: For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far

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away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

This resonates with Veronica Strang’s (2005) insistence that we make meaning with the materiality of the world, through formulating imaginative and symbolic concepts and categories. Materiality anchors and crystallizes the meanings aligned with the phenomenological and affective experience of the landscape. Historical accounts record the multiple features in the landscape that have served as otherworldly dominions for supernatural and mythical creatures. Deep forests, mountains, waterfalls, caves, swamps, lakes, deserts, and the sea are saturated with such allusions. Similarly, light continually changes and may be difficult to pin down, but its symbolic qualities endure. On particular occasions and at certain places, light solicits powerful affects, emotions, and sensations, and thereby accrues a host of symbolic meanings. Such sites and events may become meaningful sites of wonder or contemplation, signifying metaphorical concepts and cultural practices. As I discuss in chapter 7, the largely malign beings that occupy the dark world after daylight fades are more varied and numerous than the mythical creatures that occupy realms of light. More broadly, as Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (2015, 46) claim, light and darkness “form part of an ancient and extended set of symbols which are ubiquitous in theology, philosophy, literature and the arts.” This tendency for light to inspire the symbolic or metaphorical, or to signify the power of unseen supernatural or divine agencies, is particularly apparent where it is especially bright or unusual. As Barbara Weightman (1996, 59) contends, “Specific environmental objects, landscapes, and structures are invested with holiness,” and sound, smell, color, and light are integral to numerous sacred rites and rituals. Besides the ubiquitous divinity of the sun in ancient religions, rainbows spawn numerous myths, the aurora borealis constitutes the domain of supernatural beings, and lightning suggests the work of inhuman forces. The centrality of light to the sacred is evident at Stonehenge, where archaeologists surmise that the structure functioned as a celestial observatory to witness the winter and summer solstices, and at the Neolithic chambered cairn at Maeshowe, Orkney, where at the winter solstice, the rays of the setting sun shine directly down the entrance passage. Such architectonic functions characterize many other ancient sacred structures. More metaphysically, Elisabeth Bronfen (2013) describes how the ancient Greek

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goddess Nyx embodies night, Hera is the goddess of daylight, and Aether is the god of air and light; all are part of a subtle, complex cosmogony in which they represent an array of negative and positive characteristics. In Christianity, light also has powerful sacred associations. In Genesis 1:1–­5, on the first day, God transforms the formless, dark void of the Earth—­“Let there be light: and there was light”—­and subsequently divides the night from day. Similarly, in John 1:5–­6, God is described as “light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and are not practicing the truth.” Light is thus also truth and revelation, as 2 Corinthians 4:6 cites: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” Light provides evidence of God’s eternal and immanent presence, and conceives Jesus as “the light of the world.” Similarly, in Islam, light provides an ordering, sacred force, and Allah is regarded as the light of the heavens and of the Earth. Throughout history, there are numerous occasions on which “light and color in brilliant, radiant, and lustrous glory disclose events and messages from beings supreme,” besides constituting the realm of mythical beings such as angels (Weightman 1996). As I discuss in the following chapter, in church architecture light is deployed to make the presence of God manifest and enchant sacred space with affective power. In recent times, new age and neo-­pagan groups have reinvigorated rituals associated with the arrival of winter and summer solstices, attending ancient sites and performing invented ceremonies (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Later evocations of the sublime in landscape are inspired by the play of light that induces sentiments of awe and the power of nature, especially manifest in glowering clouds, bursts of sunlight, intense sunsets and sunrises, luminous mist, or strong contrasts between light and dark. Light has also proved symbolic as a way to banish the gloom of overcrowded cities and produce open, hygienic spaces full of fresh air, to serve a modernizing force for enlightenment and rational recreation, part of the design of cities. These mythical, moral, and religious interpretations add to the profusion of symbolic meanings associated with light, underlining the importance of acknowledging the imbrication of the representational and the nonrepresentational in visual apprehensions of landscape. Besides the (post)phenomenological integration of subject and object in the sensing of the landscape, discursive and representational treatments also inform apprehension, and in turn, apprehension is conducive to the reproduction of forms of representation. For instance, romantic discourses of “the

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sublime” continue to inform sensibilities about how to represent light and landscape, and influence artists and photographers who try to capture the darkened skies, gathering clouds, sunsets, eclipses, and sunrises. Such representational endeavors are entangled with particular cultural practices of sightseeing, informed by doxic understandings about what kinds of social and somatic practices should be undertaken in order to consume landscapes freighted with numerous historical and cultural associations. The camera supplements other techniques of gazing on the landscape, from Claude glasses to mirrors (Urry and Larsen 2012), that extend modes of visual apprehension and aesthetic interpretation through the consumption of archetypal characteristics. A brief consideration of landscape painting reveals that artists have expended much effort trying to “capture” the effects of the light: for they “know that to paint . . . a ‘landscape’ is to paint both earth and sky, and that earth and sky blend in the perception of a world in continuous formation” (Ingold 2005, 104). The impressionist painters of the nineteenth century are particularly pertinent because they devised a novel way to represent light, following the influence of J. M. W. Turner, often referred to as “the Painter of Light” for his vibrant renderings of luminosity and the evanescent vitality of air and light. Unlike the discrete colors rendered by the “academic painter,” the impressionist, irrespective of the location, sees light as “bathing everything not in dead whiteness, but in a thousand conflicting vibrations, in rich prismatic decompositions of colour” (Jules Laforgue, quoted in Clark 1984, 16). Georges Seurat’s intentions to capture the emotional charge and vibrations of light and color in his pointillist compositions feature clustered stipples that articulate his concept of chromoluminarism. The dynamic, dappled play of light and shadow across lively scenes of urban life are depicted in the paintings of Auguste Renoir, and in a series of paintings of the same site over time, Claude Monet portrays the ever-­ changing light that reflects on and tints lily ponds, woods, haystacks, train stations, and cathedrals. Indeed, Monet claimed that “landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life, the air and the light, which vary continually” (quoted in Thornes 2008, 575). These vital qualities diverge from attempts to capture objectively and accurately the particular light at a certain time and place; instead, they endeavor to represent light in its shifting, vibrant qualities that correspond to an affective and sensual engagement with place. The works of Monet, along with those of Cruz-­Diez and Eliasson, draw

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attention to the processual ways in which landscape, always a ceaselessly changing, vital realm, is perceived with the equally vital light that belongs to it. They also reinforce awareness of the temporal dimensions of perception. Indeed, though other representational practices, whether artistic, architectural, religious, or mythical, may construe a detached observer who identifies the distinctive qualities through which aesthetic properties, sacred presence, mythical signification, or moral quality are signified by light, such separation from space and light is illusory, as is any suggestion that landscapes are timeless, possessing definitive, everlasting features. For as I have insisted, the cultural and the phenomenological are thoroughly entangled in the ways in which humans multisensually perceive the landscape with light. The dynamic play of levels of light in the sky and across space solicits an ongoing attunement for those enmeshed within the landscape. These sensory engagements and perceptions are subsequently interpreted according to distinctive cultural and historical understandings, which along with the specificities of human visual apparatus underline the wholly particular ways in which we make sense of light and landscape.

Chapter 2

Under the Dynamic Sky: Living and Creating with Light

Daylight, Place, and Landscape In this chapter, I analyze the qualities and levels of light that fall on particular landscapes and the cultural conventions that inform how these spaces are apprehended and represented. In the first part, I investigate how the light of particular landscapes contributes to a sense of belonging by drawing on autoethnographic extracts, representations of place in photography, painting, film and texts, art installations, and cultural events. In the second part, I consider how architects manipulate natural light to provide sensual, affective, and symbolic interior spaces. I want to emphasize that our experience of light is rarely subject to any conscious focus because it takes place in the unremarkable settings of everyday realms and as part of the quotidian routines in which we are entangled. This familiar space forms an unquestioned backdrop to daily tasks, pleasures, and movements, practices that are repeatedly and unreflexively carried out. The familiar environment is organized to enable continuity and stability, which is in turn re-­created by these regular practices. Surrounded by familiar things, routes, and fixtures, we make our home by the repetitive performance of habits, gaining a sense of belonging through customary, routine engagement (Edensor 2006). These unreflexive practices are further sustained by a collective sense of place grounded through shared spatial and temporal constellations where a host of individual paths and routines coincide (Hägerstrand 1982). Habits link individuals to groups so that “cultural community is often established by people together tackling the world around them with familiar manoeuvres,” strengthening affective and cognitive links, and they underpin a common sense that this is how things are and this is how we do things (Frykman and Löfgren 1996, 10–­11). Thus paths, constellations of copresence, fixtures, meeting points, and intersections stabilize social relations in 27

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time-­space. This familiar space, its affordances and functions, is produced through daily household tasks and recreations, inhabitants’ repeti­tive commutes to work or school, drives to the shop and post office, visits to the local library or pub, or walks with the dog. David Seamon (1979) terms these routine maneuvers “place ballets” and contends that they foster a mundane, unreflexive sense of being in the world to consolidate what David Crouch (1999) calls “lay geographical knowledge.” Significantly, besides forming the basis for the practical accomplishments of living, working, and relaxing, the everyday is also a profoundly sensual space. As Lucy Lippard (1997, 34) comments, “If one has been raised in a place, its textures and sensations, its smells and sounds, are recalled as they felt to child’s, adolescent’s, adult’s body.” This interaction with everyday space involves an embodied knowledge, and its unreflexive apprehension is therefore informed by a sensual understanding deepened by time and embedded in memory (Noble 2004). The mundane textures, smells, sounds, and sights of familiar spaces, the subtleties of climate, the forms of everyday vegetation, and the medley of birdsong pervade quotidian homes, gardens, parks, streets, and neighborhood backyards. The accumulation of repetitively sensed experiences becomes sedimented in individual bodies to condense unreflexive belonging. This sensory knowing of familiar space is intertwined with particular cultural values, for the senses are always partially cultural, are “cumulative and accomplished, rather than given,” and can never provide unmediated access to the world as purely “natural” tools (Stewart 1999, 18). As Constance Claessen (1993, 9) emphasizes, “We not only think about our senses, we think through them,” since “sensory values not only frame a culture’s experience, they express its ideals, its hopes and its fears.” For instance, while human patterns of sleep have been modified with the advent of widespread electric lighting, going to bed after dark and rising after daybreak remain entrenched in the dominant moral and health regimes of most cultures. These sedimented, institutionalized cultural practices emerge out of encounters with particular environmental circumstances. For instance, Tim Ingold (2007, S20) suggests that dwelling means to “inhabit the open . . . within a weather world in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain, sunshine, and earth in continuation of its own existence.” Being in place is thus both emergent and contingent according to how inhabitants continuously adapt to weather, which as Phillip Vannini et al. (2012, 370) contend, “occasions activities, provides us with resources, facilitates certain types of actions and discourages others, and prompts us to learn certain

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kinds of techniques for everyday living.” As part of the weather of place, light becomes the subject of practical engagement by those who dwell and move through the landscape, as well as the topic of familiar, everyday discussion about what is happening outside. In the UK, this has become something of a national trait, as people commonly greet each other with such phrases as “it’s bright and breezy today” or “a bit gloomy, isn’t it?” Integral to the experience and understanding of specific landscapes and ingrained in cultural myths, habitual sensations, and practices, light affords orientation to the time of day and year, offers a sense of geographical direction, shapes growing seasons, warms and illuminates gardens and homes, and influences the hues of the materialities and textures in the landscape. Because modes of practice and apprehension are habitual and rarely subject to conscious thought, they are difficult to identify, yet their affordances profoundly shape how we interact with place. For instance, consider how we draw the curtains as daylight fades or close the shutters to keep out the early afternoon glare and heat. The modernist tendency in northern climes has been to increase the amount of light that enters the house by installing larger windows, yet in brighter longitudes, smaller windows restrict the flow of light. The increasing popularity of conservatories in northern Europe testifies to the desire to linger longer in the extended brightness of the summer day. Moreover, a premium is placed on accommodation that possesses a south-­or southwest-­facing aspect so that inhabi­tants may bask in the morning sun in a garden or lounge, and stimulate houseplant growth. Contrastingly, in Mediterranean urban squares, large, dense trees provide shade at midday. People orient their walking trajectories to occupy the sunny or shady side of the street. As the evenings extend in many cities, the pattern of activity changes as inhabitants seek out the social life of the streets, leaving behind the homes in which they remained during the darker months to haunt beer gardens, jog, stroll, or sit outside and watch the sun go down. For those who inhabit landscapes where sunlight or snow glare is particularly strong, practical measures such as wearing hats and sunglasses, applying sunscreen, and walking in the shade speak of anticipatory provision, tacit knowledge, and practical adaptation. Residents become habituated to certain conditions of luminosity (Rantala et al. 2011). This does not infer that such sensory and practical habits endure indefinitely, for people also adapt to changing circumstances in which light becomes more or less available. In a fascinating example that reveals the allure of natural light for those unused to dwelling within it, Sophie Haines (2012) shows how forest dwellers in Belize moved their houses to the side

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of a new road where the canopy had been cleared. Bright daylight was suddenly admitted to their environs, and for these inhabitants, the clearing of forest space symbolized modernity and progress while also heralding the potential arrival of electric light; daylight and artificial illumination radically altered the material conditions and meanings of their everyday world. In identifying these regular temporal social practices and sensual experiences, it is useful to consider Henri Lefebvre’s assertion of the importance of rhythms. Lefebvre (2004, 15) claims that “everywhere where  there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.” In identifying the spatiotemporal specificities of place, he further contends that “every rhythm implies the relation of a time with space, a localised time, or if one wishes, a temporalised place.” The defining rhythms of light and dark are especially evident toward the poles, where darkness pervades diurnal experience in winter and light floods the night throughout summer. This provides greatly contrasting experiences of place and landscape throughout the year and instantiates institutional practices such as the modern ritual of turning the clocks back and forward to extend the daylight hours of business, work, and education. By contrast, in the tropics, these variations of light and dark during the day are less annually marked, varying by less than four hours across the year. Echoing my contentions in the previous chapter about the vital quali­ties of landscape, Lefebvre (2004, 17–­20) also declares that “[There is] nothing inert in the world,” a contention he exemplifies with the seemingly quiescent garden suffused with the polyrhythms of “trees, flowers, birds and insects” and the forest, which “moves in innumerable ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it.” Accordingly, certain rhythms are stimulated by the ways in which nonhuman life-forms respond to the availability of daylight. The diurnal and seasonal patterns of plant growth are profoundly shaped by the rhythms of light, as the light-­sensitive pigments on the tips of leaves or buds solicit organisms to grow toward the sun, processes manifest in the landscapes and places that we inhabit. To consider how we sensorially experience particular landscapes with light, and the temporal dimensions of this apprehension, I return to James Turrell’s Skyspace in Kielder Forest. Inside the chamber the dynamic sky becomes the focus of an intensified scrutiny, a focus that draws attention to  the fact that the sky is an integral aspect of the circulations and emergences of the landscape. In becoming aware of the changing quality of the luminous celestial circle, thoughts turn to how this light might

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tint and tincture the landscape outside the cairn, be absorbed, deflected, and refracted. Moving from inside to outside reveals how Skyspace is intimately part of the landscape, for it attunes us to the myriad ways in which light modulates a northern English forest landscape. When cloud cover is thick, the light bestows a uniformly dense, dark green on the forest that blankets the land, while the nearby large reservoir resembles a flat, metallic sheet without subtlety of tone. Yet a sudden burst of sunlight through the thick cloud disaggregates the arboreal mass into a variegated patchwork of green hues, picking out distinctive clusters and some individual trees, and the reservoir glistens and shimmers with multiple shades of white, blue, and gray. As the evening sun descends, longer shadows are carved across space, and in the forest, strict contrasts between green and black impose a two-­tone pattern across its expanse. Finally, as the blue hour gathers, the mass of trees once more acquires uniformity, this time of darker gray, except where a few trees stand above the skyline to form starkly delineated silhouettes. After visiting the Skyspace, our gaze is drawn toward the sky as we develop an awareness of how shifting levels of light cause us to attune and reattune to this particular landscape, alternately focusing on the horizon, vibrantly colored things near and far, textures suddenly acutely rendered visible, changing tones, and individual features. Although most geographical accounts of landscape focus on land use, cultural identity, vegetation, and geomorphology, the numerous qualities that the light bequeaths to the landscape contribute powerfully to a sense of place. While sunlight may possess a similar intensity and rhythm across broad areas of the globe, local variations in weather and, above all, the distinctive earthly elements that reflect, refract, and absorb light in particular ways shape the ways in which we perceive a landscape. These properties are supplemented by the cultural resonances and representations that also inform our social, affective, and emotional responses. Like Kielder Forest, light-­conditioned landscapes possess a distinctiveness that resonates through everyday apprehension and popular representation, as textures, surfaces, folds, and gradients interact with light in characteristic ways. For instance, according to Lavinia Greenlaw (2006), British landscapes generally take shape under cloudiness, mild shadows, and weak suns that produce a distinctive tonal atmosphere, in which subtle and ever-­changing patterns of light and dark feature, in contrast to the fierce interplay of shadow and glare that tends to characterize more southerly landscapes. Within a larger space such as a nation, there are regional landscape variations. For instance, in northwest Scotland the play of light seems

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Figure 4. View from Skyspace to the reservoir, Kielder Forest, Northumbria, UK. The awareness of the ever-­changing qualities of the light from the sky stimulated by the experience of James Turrell’s Skyspace leads to consideration of the distinctive effects of daylight on the particular landscape represented here. Photograph by the author.

particularly distinctive: its plentiful lochs reflect water, the somewhat sparse but sometimes effusive vegetation and plentiful barren rock surfaces reflect characteristic hues, and the effects of the North Atlantic Drift generate dramatically changeable weather as it passes over the mountainous countryside. Passage through this landscape offers experiences of multihued, layered mountain vistas, silhouetted pine stands, silvery lochans, vibrant purple heather, the spreading russet of bracken, glaring mossy greens, brown-­green deposits of kelp on seashores, and the blues and grays of the sea. The unpredictable sky features a profusion of shifting clouds of manifold form and shade, and occasionally, extraordinary juxtapositions of murky clouds and brilliant patches of translucent sunlight that radiate on parts of the landscape. Indeed, one such occasion made a dramatic impact on me as I traveled through this unfamiliar landscape at the age of fourteen: We were travelling through the Western Highlands of Scotland, my mother and father, me and my sister. It had been a dismal day, with squalls of rain

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buffeting the car and we had remained ensconced in the vehicle for most of the day, apart from a couple of stops for tea and snacks. Luckily, as we sought a camping spot in the beautiful Glen Carron, the rain ceased and we stopped, quickly pitching the tent. We set up the camping stove and put on the kettle for tea. Because the kettle took some while to boil, I decided to wander down to the river about 400 metres away. I walked swiftly across the springy ground and drew the fresh air into my lungs, listening to the bird song that cascaded from the trees. As I approached the river, I glanced back towards the tent but the lie of the land meant that it was now indiscernible. I stood for a while to take in the view. It was late spring and low, intense rays of sun burst through, creating deep shadows and a phantasmagorical glow across the landscape. As I walked to the riverbank, the birds suddenly ceased singing and swiftly, above the summit of the looming mountain, a huge mass of black cloud gathered, seeming all the more disconcerting in coexisting with the thinly spread sunlight. At once, the entire atmosphere seemed to change. The only sound was the tumultuous roar of the raging river, swollen by the rain. If I had walked a few yards further, I would be swallowed up by this torrent, hurled into its depths. The darkening accumulation of cloud intimated a deeper sense of foreboding about what was going to happen in the world. Looking back once more, the tent remained invisible. I was transfixed, immobile. Would I ever again experience the cosiness of the car, of convivial human companionship?

The potency of the experience was provoked by a combination of elemental forces, but crucially, the momentary intensity was induced through my abiding unfamiliarity with this landscape and the capacity of the sunlight to produce such effects. Such vivid impressions reveal the potential for the experience of unfamiliar landscapes to reveal the habitually, unreflexively apprehended landscapes with which we are familiar. As with the confusion prompted by being plunged into cultural settings in which we lack the familiar competencies through which we address strangers, order meals, buy items, or take public transport, so the sensory strangeness of other landscapes—­unfamiliar breezes, temperatures, textures, and sounds, as well as peculiar light—­can produce feelings of bewilderment, delight, or estrangement. To a northern European, the luridly spectacular sunsets of Los Angeles that coexist with an unfamiliar humid nocturnal gloom can solicit a deep spatial disorientation. Representing the Light of Landscape An encounter with the strange, though typically not too strange, is a key motivation for tourists in temporarily moving away from their everyday

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worlds (see Edensor 2001). This desire for unfamiliar experience is mani­ fest in an increasing range of tourist destinations that promote “celestial tourism” (Weaver 2011). Adverts entreat tourists to witness—­and photograph—­landscapes where distinctive forms of light diverge from ordinary experience. Besides the nocturnal experiences of dark sky parks and aurora, these include diurnal attractions based on sunsets and sunrises, and visitors to northerly European realms are lured by the dramatic qualities of Nordic light (Birkeland 1999). On the official Norwegian tourist website, Visit Norway, the following appeal is made to those who seek a holiday in the “Land of the Midnight Sun,” traveling to Tromsø, the Northern Cape, Hammerfest, or other locations in the Arctic Circle to witness the light-­filled landscape: “24 hours of daylight gives the flora and fauna along the coast an energy boost. This is likely to rub off on visitors as well, so why not use the extra energy to experience some of the many midnight sun activities available throughout Northern Norway?” Activities include fishing, walking, kayaking, cycling, whale watching, and dining. These same sites are winter destinations for tourists who seek darkness and the aurora borealis. The lights of the far south are also depicted in travel accounts, with various descriptions of the illusory, uncertain, and blinding light of the Antarctic rendered by those unfamiliar with such effects (Yusoff 2007). An installation at Sydney’s 2014 VIVID light festival, Terra Incognita, by McDermott Baxter Light Art, attempted to capture the effects of the Antarctic light by drawing on the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson’s account of the 1911–­14 expedition to map hitherto unknown areas of the icy continent. Mawson and his colleagues wax lyrical about the ever-­changing light of this polar region, despite the appalling privations they bore. The exhibit featured dramatic sequences of vibrantly colored lighting together with extracts from Mawson’s diary and other writings recorded in a voice-­over, to evoke the harsh yet beautiful landscape. Here are two extracts: A calm morning in June, the sky is clear and the north ablaze with the colours of sunrise—­or is it sunset? The air is delicious, and a cool waft comes down the glacier. A deep ultramarine, shading up into a soft purple hue, blends in a colour-­scheme with the lilac plateau. The liquid globe of sun has departed, but his glory still remains. Down from the zenith his colours descend through greenish-­blue, yellowish-­green, straw yellow, light terracotta to a diffuse brick-­red; each reflected in the dull sheen of freezing sea. Out on the infinite horizon float icebergs in a mirage of mobile gold.

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These evocative accounts demonstrate how the light of certain landscapes features in travel literature. Other creative forms and media practices are equally concerned with representing light. In photography and painting, a plenitude of advice to amateur practitioners is disseminated about the techniques, equipment, and locations through which light effects might be captured. Professional photographers also attempt to encapsulate the quality of specific landscapes, and this can contribute to the sustenance of “national landscape ideologies,” in which the characteristics attributed to landscapes epitomize esteemed national qualities (Short 1991; Edensor 2002). Melissa Miles (2013) describes how sunlight was invoked to produce a powerful, mystical connection between white settler Australians and the land that they claimed as their own. The idealization of a distinctive Australian sunlight guided the colony to differentiate itself from the grayness of Britain and encouraged residents to forge an affective connection to the harsh environment. Through art, literature, drama, and poetry, the energy of the sun came to penetrate the national psyche and stand for the promise and youth of the new nation. This bright sunlight is presented as an essentially Australian characteristic, natural and ahistorical, yet in critiquing these pervasive and essentialist myths of national space, Miles shows how recent Australian photographers have investigated alternative ways to conceive light and its volatile, ineffable, and ambivalent effects on photography. Elsewhere, the ways in which sunlight subtly changes the hues and textures of certain desert landscapes condition place identity. Yet though they may seem impassive and exacting environments, the ecosystems of such landscapes may be precarious, as David Stentiford’s (2014) discussion of Lewis Baltz’s photographs of the Nevada desert demonstrates. Whereas such western deserts were painted and photographed to emphasize the sublime light that suffuses them, Baltz works to decenter such visions in the face of urban expansion, his photographs depicting the proliferating waste and the encroachment of artificial illumination that is transforming the qualities and apprehension of spaces formerly lit only by celestial light. The glaring desert landscape also serves as a powerful symbolic backdrop in diverse film genres including westerns, war films, and art movies, and perhaps most famously, Lawrence of Arabia. Characteristically, Sean Cubitt (2008, 119) claims, the desert is portrayed as a landscape of extremity that “permits an extreme moment of exposure—­of visibility and of embodiment.” The human figure is stripped down to essentials, may suffer or may stoically survive privations, become a more resolute character, or experience an epiphany amid the harsh beauty.

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I have mentioned the impressionists’ endeavors to represent the vitality of light; other painters have also endeavored to honor how light inflects specific landscapes. John Constable was famously engaged in a sustained, almost obsessive attempt to identify the manifold play of clouds and light across southern England, with a particular focus on the skies of Salisbury, Suffolk, Hampshire, and Hampstead Heath. The Heath was the location for more than one hundred paintings created at different times of day and season that also investigated the varied effects of wind speed and direction, and cloud type. Constable’s aesthetic concerns were allied to his acute scientific interest in the dynamic meteorological processes that produced such effects and were termed by Kenneth Clark as “the romantic conjunction of science and ecstasy” (quoted in Thornes 2008, 572). This depiction chimes with Gernot Böhme’s (1993) notion of the ecstatic in connoting how the clouds, colors, and luminescence of the sky ecstatically inflect the landscape. In writing about the importance of the sky to English landscape and national identity, Pyrs Gruffudd (1991, 19) cites the author of a 1946 book on weather who proudly proclaims, “It is this country with its changing skies and flying cloud shadows that has produced Wordsworth, Constable and Turner.” He also cites the architectural historian Nicklaus Pevsner’s opinion that Constable’s skies signified “true Englishness.” Gruffudd quotes a contributor to a 1932 book on the English landscape who asserts of the painter’s works in Suffolk, “Nowhere does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky.” Here the sky and landscape serve to idealize both regional and national identity. I have already mentioned the strong associations of light with Nordic identity, notably Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish notions of belonging to place and landscape. Henry Plummer (2012, 6) evocatively points to the “low slant of the sun . . . long shadows and strikingly refracted colours” in the winter months. During long twilights he describes how “sky and snow are equally tinged with rainbow hues that linger for hours” and how on midsummer evenings “the sun dissolves into an unreal haze that bathes the land in a fairy-­like glow, its colours strangely muted and blurred.” While Plummer acknowledges the diverse topographies and ecologies of the Nordic nations, he submits that “their skies share a subdued light that imbues the entire region with mystery.” As he asserts, these light effects have “permeated the arts” in these countries, stimulating representations of “the frailest, most evanescent aspects of nature,” as well as “a mystical intensity to

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urban scenes” and “quiet domestic interiors.” The latter are conditioned by an “ethereal light washing into barren rooms to bring every surface under its spell, as it melts away contours and hangs in the air” (6–­7). Jan Garnert (2011) focuses on representations of midnight and twilight radiance in the paintings of Anders Zorn of Sweden and how the people in his paintings, the rowers, strollers, farming folk, dancers, bathers, and occupants of sitting rooms, followed singular social and seasonal rhythms that contribute to particular moods and atmospheres. Relatedly, Juhu Pallasmaa (2011, 24) considers the collective work of such Nordic paintings to be characterized by a “uniformity of feeling” that he describes as “a sense of humility and silence, and a distinct sense of melancholy” that resonates with a common “low and horizontal illumination” or “subdued and soft light” that illuminates water, snow, and ice. Pallasmaa’s sudden, startling revelation about his formerly unacknowledged familiarity with this northerly light and environment was accentuated for him by viewing these paintings in a Spanish museum into which the sharp southern sun burst. For Danes, the qualities of Nordic light are captured by the Skagen group of painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including P. S. Krøyer, Anna Ancher, Michael Ancher, Holger Drachmann, and Thorvald Bindesbøll, who established a colony at the northern Danish coastal village of that name. They were attracted by the blend of seascape and the quality of the light that provided fertile conditions for the emergent practice of plein air painting. The light represented in their paintings ranges from stormy skies and still summer radiance to midnight sun, vibrant sunsets and sunrises, moonlit nights, and wintry, diffuse luminosity. The most celebrated of these painters, Krøyer, was especially inspired by the light of the evening “blue hour,” in which water and sky seem to merge. Skagen is now a popular tourist destination, marketed as the “Land of Light” and holding an annual “Blue September” festival to celebrate the twilight period celebrated by Krøyer (Visit Denmark n.d.). Though these associations with light are deeply enmeshed with cultural identity, Barbara Matusiak (2012) attempts to provide a scientific grounding for the unique qualities of Nordic light. She maintains that a low solar elevation angle dominates for much of the year, with extended periods of twilight and the distinctive occurrence of white nights north of the Arctic Circle around the summer solstice. She argues that there is a marked infrequency of sunny skies, notably in winter, and these factors determine the illuminance level at the ground, the color of daylight, and how light is reflected, refracted, and absorbed in the landscape. Garnert (2011)

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similarly contends that the seasonal variations of light and dark stretch across places of similar latitudes, yet these are sparsely populated, and so a richly shared experience of these distinctive daylight qualities lingers in Nordic sensory apprehension of space and affective experience, and resonates through habits and cultural representations. Whether these powerful associations of light with Nordic landscapes and rhythms are scientifically accurate is, however, beside the point, for they continue to influence cultural identity and ways of sensing and, as I discuss below, inform a distinctive approach to the use of light in architecture (for a critique of the notion of “Nordic Light,” see Bille 2013). It is instructive to compare the qualities of light sought in these Nordic works with a contemporary artist’s account of her attraction to painting the very different, “brilliant tropical light” in Sabah, Malaysia, just north of the equator, during the monsoon season: “It rains most days, producing a wonderful mix of early morning light, gathering monsoon clouds, heavy rain, and then brilliant sunshine. As the light fades and the sun sets, streaks of brilliant red flash across the sky. It is heady stuff. I felt saturated by heat and light” (Conway 2010, 240). Works of land and environmental art also draw focused attention to how light shapes the apprehension of the particular landscapes in which they are situated. Exemplary here is Walter De Maria’s ostensibly minimalist Lightning Field (1977), set in a high desert plain in New Mexico and consisting of four hundred twenty-­foot-­tall, thin, stainless steel poles that act as gigantic lightning rods and are arranged in a rectangular grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. To experience the work, visitors must travel to the remote site, and it is recommended that they view the poles over a prolonged spell. As Christopher Tilley et al. (2000, 42–­43) consider, underlining my earlier point about the temporality of seeing with light, “time as well as space becomes embodied within environmental art, not simply in the production of the art but in the act of encountering and experiencing it: travelling to the site, the duration of the visit, the hour of the day, the season of the year.” Over a protracted period, viewers may experience the impact of the changing light on the poles and on the subtle variations it bestows across the flat landscape, ringed with distant mountains. As John Beardsley (1982, 227–­28) remarks, the effects of the light on the work make it “sometimes a chimeric work, disappearing in the bright midday sun and becoming fully visible only at dawn and dusk when the entire length of each pole glows with reflected light.” Anna Chave (2008) comments on the sudden impact of intense light on the poles’ appearance during sunsets and sunrise, and on the rare occasions when lightning strikes.

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By virtue of its remote location, interpretations of Lightning Field tend to be imbricated with notions of the sublime that continue to typify depictions of light and rural landscape. In contrast, an installation that draws in the light that plays across an urban landscape is Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004), on the west side of Chicago’s Millennium Park. This sixty-­six-­foot-­ long, forty-­four-­foot-­high, and thirty-­three-­foot wide, flawlessly polished, stainless steel, curvilinear, elliptically arched structure provides a massive metal mirror that distorts and defamiliarizes the city that surrounds it. The reflections bring surrounding spectators and the lofty skyscrapers that cluster beyond the park’s northern boundary into the piece, but its reflective surface is dominated above all by the changing sky above the city. Cloud Gate thus has the capacity to foster a strong social and phenomenological connection to one’s own body, the bodies of other onlookers, the immediate surroundings of the park, the larger urban space, and, overwhelmingly, the sky and its clouds. An artwork of very different provenance features in the High Line Park that occupies a former elevated freight railway in Manhattan. Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways is set in the windows of a loading dock in the former Chelsea Market Building that lies alongside the park. The piece’s title is a translation of the Native American name for the Hudson River that refers to how it flows downstream but is also subject to tidal surges. It is composed of seven hundred tinted panes of glass that represent the ever-­changing, evanescent colors of the flowing water. Finch undertook a seven-­hundred-­minute journey on a tugboat, photographing the river’s surface every minute. Each pane represents the hue of a single pixel from within each photograph, and these are organized into a chrono­logical sequence via a grid arrangement that tracks the journey. These snapshots capture something of the river’s innumerable colors that change in response to the light cast by the angle of the sun and in accordance with season, time of day, weather conditions, and water quality. The work thus honors the manifold qualities of light that reflect off the surface of moving water and thoroughly recognizes the processual experience of place, here focusing on an element that is linear, ever changing and continuously moving. It also foregrounds the river’s historical role in providing a way to transport goods and people but also a sensuous engagement with its flowing waters by those who plied its course. Finally, also staged in New York is a vernacular and highly place-­specific staging of light that ironically refers back to ancient rituals associated with solstices. Manhattanhenge, a recently created event, does not occur precisely at the summer equinox but twice, once in May and once in July.

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Figure 5. Spencer Finch: The River That Flows Both Ways, High Line, New York City. Seven hundred tinted panes of glass represent the ever-­changing, evanescent colors of the flowing water, underpinning a sense of the experience of place. Photograph by the author.

With its towering buildings creating canyon-­like streets across the city’s grid pattern, Andrew Wasserman (2012, 96) states that “the event allows for a restructuring of one’s experience of the city: it makes newly visible the relationship between the two-­dimensional and three-­dimensional structure of the city.” The city’s modernist form is integral in shaping the dra-

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matic impact of the sun’s rays. Climactically, as the sun rests in the center of the road above the horizon, a blast of light fills the channel, “dramatically contrasting against the darkened, dusk-­lit city that surrounds it.” As Wasserman asserts, “The individual spectator becomes part of a collective watching of the city, signalling for some an awareness of their placement within both the city and the universe” (104). Above, I have investigated the mundane habits, rhythms, and sensory perceptions of the everyday and how these are shaped in response to the daylight characteristics of inhabited places. I have also explored affective, emotional, and sensory responses to the ways in which daylight falls on particular landscapes. In addition, I have looked at various forms of travel literature, photography, film, and painting to investigate the responses of creators in representing these distinctive light effects. Finally, I have looked at how artists and others have endeavored to reveal the light of place and landscape through site-­specific installations and staged events. In so doing, I have grounded the previous chapter’s focus on the phenomenological and culturally entangled ways in which humans perceive with light by looking at how specific, situated sensory attunements, affects, and meanings resonate in artistic representations of landscapes and situated cultural practices. The Architectural Manipulation of Luminosity: Sacred and Modern Daylighting In this section, I explore how daylight has been orchestrated to produce distinctive effects, moods, and meanings in interior spaces, undergirding a profound sense of being in place that extends out to forge relationships with the outside. The manipulation of daylight by architects can illuminate particular areas, cast away darkness, provide a sense of time passing, enhance the qualities of things and materialities, and convey powerful symbolic meanings. Daylighting thus has the capacity to blur boundaries between the material and immaterial. For instance, Cathryn Vasseleau (1998, 13) insists that light offers up “hinges or points of contact which constitute the interweaving of the material and ideal strands of the field of vision.” Accordingly, inside sacred buildings, light connotes the presence and agency of divinity while also enhancing the sensuous qualities of interior space. Besides its centrality to sacred prehistoric rituals, the use of daylight has been an integral part of architecture since ancient times. Rome’s Pantheon stands out among venerable buildings in possessing a capacious interior toned by its oculus, the giant circular opening at the apex of its dome that admits rays of sunlight that move around the chamber.

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Archaeologists speculate that this may have had a sacred function as a giant sundial through which a single sunbeam marked the daily advent of midday or illuminated the doorway on auspicious occasions. Such numinous moments—­when light shines on symbolic spaces or icons, charges precious materials with its shine or glow, or is absorbed or disseminated by colored windows—­connote divine, sublime power and recurrent moments in the cyclical rhythms of religious cosmologies. Light is an enduring ingredient of the religious experience of the material world and has been continually deployed by the designers of sacred buildings, as Aldous Huxley (1963, 109) elucidates: “Religious art has always and everywhere made use of these vision inducing materials. The shrine of gold, the chryselephantine statue, the jewelled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the altar.” For instance, Rosemary Cramp (2013) speculates that in the dark interiors of Anglo-­Saxon halls, illumined only by open doors and shutters or flickering flames, the shimmering metalwork of jewelry and weapons was highly prized, enhancing gloomy space with the shine of gold and garnets, as the prevalence of numerous Anglo-­Saxon words for reflective light and changing colors suggests. With the advent of Christianity and the growth of travel to Europe and the Holy Land, different forms of lighting circulated more extensively to enliven sacred spaces. For example, a new domain of light and color emerged in Anglo-­Saxon churches with the growing use of glass windows that allowed beams of light to illuminate sacred spaces within churches. Along with candles and lamps that tinctured tombs, crosses, and painted images, this daylight “reflected on the surfaces of precious metals, shining carvings and banners, the golden covers of books and the altar blazing with the flames of gems and yellow gold,” creating numerous focal points for devotion and divinity (11). Similarly, in medieval Byzantine churches, the development of luxurious furnishings such as vaulting, exuberant mosaics, and carved chancel screens required pale light to enhance their allure (Dell’acqua 2005). In western European church architecture, the most significant development was increasingly complex and radiant stained-­glass window designs. The huge breakthrough heralded by the advent of Gothic flying buttresses and pointed arches that superseded the massive, sturdy walls, thick columns, and small, round-­arched windows of Romanesque architecture allowed much larger windows to be constructed, permitting far greater quantities of light to enter ecclesiastical interiors. Also vital were the emergent possibilities heralded by adding metal oxides to glass to produce vibrant colors.

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Subsequent rapid development of stained-­glass technologies and artistry, and the increasingly perpendicular styles that emerged, ensured that effervescent light augmented the interior experience of colossal cathedrals. Light was a prevailing metaphor in these medieval times and “resonated profoundly with the concepts of clarity and opacity that functioned as primary dichotomies for both moral and ontological systems,” and these “translucent tapestries” were “planes for storytelling” (Raguin 2003, 13), acting as teaching tools to disseminate biblical stories as well as local and national histories. Cosmologically speaking, the color experienced in stained glass displayed how God animated but was also beyond the material world: colors belonged to the material world, but their illumination by the sun made light visible and thus revealed divine agency. Moreover, the powerful effects of the colored light flooding a church’s interior or the vibrant luminosity of the leaded panels constituted a focus for meditation. Contemplating such light was a route to the divine, of temporary transportation away from earthly cares. As Virginia Raguin writes, “Image, space, colour, light and materials fused in a visual concord,” revealing how stained glass produces a combination of symbolic, aesthetic, and affective impacts (20). Accordingly, the use of stained glass and other techniques that illuminate the inside with the radiance outside underpins how light “does not necessarily remain separated between language metaphors of abstract, textual symbolism, and the visual and visceral sensation of light.” In such sacred contexts, light “reveals the continuity between matter, metaphysics, metaphor and religious practice” (Bille and Sørensen, forthcoming). Apprehension of the light passing through a stained-­glass window depends on the quality and angle of the light outside, and the translucency and color of the glass. It also crucially depends on the levels of light inside the cathedral. Panels tinted with dark hues stand out luminously against a gloomy interior but are less effective if the cathedral’s interior is lighter. As the development of tracery expanded the size and complexity of windows, a progressively lighter color palette was employed. The greater range of colors and increasingly elaborate lead designs produced an effusion of creativity, which, according to John Piper (1968), diminished after the Reformation, where a focus on paintings and pictorialism replaced crea­ tions informed by faithfulness to the intrinsic qualities of glass and lead. The best windows could be “at once cold and fiery—­luminous as if themselves the source of light—­incandescent, icy prisms, mapping the cosmology of an idea.” Light used thus had “extraordinary power to dominate a space and determine its atmosphere,” especially if we consider that during

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its most creative period, the absence of any effective artificial light would have made the experience of stained glass particularly mesmerizing (Sowers 1965, 31). The popularity of stained glass as a way to convey light to interior spaces has fluctuated since this heyday, with a nineteenth-­century surge inspired by the Gothic Revival, the arts and crafts movement, and pre-­Raphaelite art (Raguin 1990). In modern times, new technical and design possibilities have emerged, with multiple variants of glass, diverse colors, and varied textures deployed in secular as well as sacred settings, and artists including Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Le Corbusier among exponents of the art. As I discuss below, the different application of light has been an essential constituent in much modern design. The play of light in Islamic art is especially profound in the sensuous spaces of the Alhambra, the palace fortress complex in Granada, which marks the high point of Almoravid Andalusian architecture, where assorted effects enchant the diverse halls, chambers, and courts. In the interior spaces, light enters through windows or elaborately carved screens, playing across the complex interlaced geometries of the decorative rhomboidal sebka panels that line walls and arches, the array of small, pointed niches that make up the muqarnas in domed ceilings, and the elaborate arabesques that cover many surfaces. As the intensity and angle of the sunlight entering the chambers changes during the day, the shadows that play across these three-­ dimensional decorative elements endlessly transform their appearance and periodically highlight certain features. For instance, the cupola in the Hall of the Two Sisters is illuminated by light from the sixteen latticed windows, animating the muqarnas composed out of an estimated five thousand honeycombs and giving a sense of animated movement outward from the center, a cascading effect that accentuates some forms and dissolves others to convey a sense of weightlessness. This extraordinary use of light and sophisticated geometry produces an ornamentation that is intense yet harmonious. Movement through the palace reveals successive light effects, as interior and outside spaces merge in translucent marble columns and floors, sparkling and still water, and a medley of subtle shadows. The architectural manipulation of light through which interior spaces are endowed with metaphysical, affective, sensual, and symbolic qualities to deliver an intensified experience of place took a different turn in the twentieth century. New developments in glass, concrete, and steel building technologies heralded the advent of modernist styles, expanding possibilities for deploying daylight, which was subsequently reconceptualized as an integral building material (Menin and Samuel 2002). The impera-

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tive of nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century environmental campaigners to devise urban spaces in which refreshment and recreation away from crowded urban conditions could be sought was thought to foster “physical, mental and spiritual health,” not to mention moral sustenance (Hickman 2013, 114). Modernist architects asserted that a flood of daylight inside buildings augmented cherished qualities of cleanliness, hygiene, and un­cluttered space. Such notions promoted transparency and reflection as positive qualities, along with an emphasis on the use of glass and white surfaces that would enhance luminosity, with darkness and shadows conceived as constituting problems in need of resolution. These aesthetic considerations were accompanied by moral imperatives among modernist architects to flood cities and building interiors with light. Yet these overwhelming desires often denied the specific ways in which light plays across particular landscapes. For example, the universalistic proclamations of the doyen of architectural modernism, Le Corbusier (1967), in The Radiant City, which ordained that designers should ubiquitously create large, horizontal windows, skylights, and balconies to maximize the availability of sunlight, denied the specific geographical relationships between sunlight and place. While the large windows of rectilinear buildings might admit plentiful light under Mediterranean skies, the same was not the case in darker, more northerly latitudes. This also influenced how sunlight conditioned experience of white-­painted exterior surfaces, with the dramatic effects of shadows varying according to geography, not to mention the susceptibility of such surfaces to weathering and staining in colder, rainier environments. Breaking down boundaries between inside and outside might not be so pertinent in climates where harsh winters necessitate a reinforcing of this division. Craig Martin (n.d.) shows how photographic practices reinforced the idea that light was universal in quality. Like contemporary representations of places in tourist promotion, photographs represented all buildings as sun-­filled irrespective of the climatic conditions in which they were situated, paying no heed to the local divergences of the play of light and shade. Frank Lloyd Wright articulated the maxim that it is essential to consider light as “part of the building itself ” (quoted in Plummer 2009, 10). Yet while moving away from the sacred allusions that typified medieval architectural impulses, the modernist deployment of daylight continues to resonate within earlier metaphorical and phenomenological intentions to foreground relationships between outside and inside, and material and immaterial. Mies van der Rohe’s “German Pavilion” in Barcelona,

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constructed in 1929 and reconstructed in the 1980s, employed modern steel and plate glass as well as more traditional materials such as marble and travertine. These materials, together with the form of the building, created a “flow between exterior and interior spaces” that is manifest in the play of reflections and shadows across glass, steel, stone, and the rect­­ an­gular, external pool (Bille and Sørensen 2007, 271). The later work of Tadao Ando similarly uses light as a relational quality that engages in different ways and at different times with other building components and the surrounding space. As Jin Baek (2009, 115) remarks, things are “articulated along borders of light and darkness, and obtain their individual form, discovering interrelationships, and become infinitely linked. Light grants autonomy to things and at the same time, prescribes their relationships.” Ando’s Church of the Light, a minimal structure that has a thin crosscut into the east facade through which light pours into the interior, renders concrete walls luminous, seemingly immaterial. Ando draws on traditions of transforming materialities through their interaction with light in ways that bring into question their solidity. The modern turn to light was, according to Plummer (2009, 11), primarily motivated by conceiving buildings above all as “domains of immaterial forces and energies” that also articulate their own fluidity and temporality in the ever-­fluctuating light. This honoring of light’s vital qualities and how it marks time through its rhythms and phases has been integral to certain architects’ practice. Louis Kahn created buildings in which shadows were a key element, and he expressly argues that increasing reliance on electric light diminishes engagement with the world outside. Accordingly, he contends that in turning on a switch, architects “forget the endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day” (Kahn 2003, 252). Ando similarly suggests that architects should devise buildings in which the constant movement and rhythm of light is accentuated in its play across interior surfaces to orchestrate successive, diverse moods and sensations. The quality of light is marked out as a crucial element in the affective and sensual experience of a building, as architects such as Ando strive to produce interior realms of “ambience and mood, shadow and reflection, tonality and temperament” (Plummer 2009, 15). Above, I cited Plummer’s lyrical account of painters who were compelled to capture landscapes and interiors under the spell of Nordic light (2012). Plummer’s primary focus, however, concerns the modern architects who have deployed the presumed qualities of Nordic light in their architecture, notably in creating interior spaces awash with sophisticated

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daylighting effects, and grounding architecture in the luminous qualities of place. Following some of the modernist strictures discussed above, architects including Alvar Aalto, Sverre Fehn, Jørn Utzon, and Arne Jacobsen sought to advance the desirability of maximizing the properties of fresh air and sunlight. However, unlike more universalistic approaches, they refused to compromise the place-­specific qualities of daylight. According to Plummer, these architects developed techniques that accommodated the dearth of sunlight in winter to create “forms that were able to collect, preserve and allocate the scant illumination, while putting its changing moods on display as a metaphysical image of the North.” This necessitated the molding of structures to admit low angles of light and the deployment of reflective materials and colors, transforming “architecture into an optical instrument” and a “metaphoric evocation” (Plummer 2012, 6–­7). Moreover, a range of techniques and methods was developed by allowing light to suffuse interiors, but also through the installation of glowing white surfaces and curved shapes to produce a sense of plasticity, or the use of more rectilinear forms and screens to create more splintered luminosities and reflections, or combinations of both to incorporate reflected and diffuse light. In the pared-­down palette of these environments, colors other than white and materials such as wood stand out vividly. Contemporary architects such as Henning Larsen, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Juhu Leiviskä follow this tradition, expanding and emphasizing different elements. Yet a common thread persists: the affective, emotional, and sensual impacts that such interior spaces produce undergird a sense of place as shaped by its distinctive light. Together with the building materials used in construction, these architectural approaches conjure up aspects of the landscape, the surfaces of lakes, billowing clouds, the shafts of light cast through forests, and radiant mists. Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen (forthcoming) explore how the deployment of Nordic light is also perpetuated in the design of contemporary Danish churches. While also central to the design of older gothic churches where the manipulation of light, shadows, and candlelight is pronounced, in modernist churches the tendency is for light to generate “a luminosity without shadows . . . to fill out the church interior completely, yet without any form of blinding glare, so as to create a sense of openness and infinity.” Architects continue to deploy daylight in multiple ways and for diverse purposes: to inculcate a relationship between inside and outside; foster a sense of connection to place and landscape; cajole movement through space; attract people to areas of luminosity and shadow; direct attention

Figure 6. Daylighting in Bagsværd Church, Copenhagen, Jørn Utzon, architect. This example shows the skillful architectural manipulation of Nordic light to condition the mood and sensuous qualities of interiors. Photograph taken by and courtesy of Mikkel Bille.

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toward particular colors, textures, and features; communicate sacred and symbolic meaning; convey a sense of time passing; enhance or investigate the qualities of materials; foreground the vitality of light and the world; or generate potent interior atmospheres. These endeavors are being advanced by the development of new technological means. Glass applications are used in multiple ways to admit, bend, and refract light, and sometimes exploited to compose a multilayering of reflections from inside and outside in ever-­shifting transparent collages. Slatted, gauzy, latticed, and stippled opaque screens are used to challenge perception, so that enchanting, sometimes illusory effects are produced as the views through them alternately “turn solid, translucent, or transparent, and the next moment dematerialize into nothing” (Plummer 2009, 119). Finally, diverse luminous building materials, including treated glass, alabaster, and various metals and plastics, are being deployed to absorb, transform, and disperse light (Murray 2012). The relationship between interiors and light will thus undoubtedly continue to be explored in novel and still unimaginable ways. In this chapter, I have investigated the mundane habits, rhythms, and sensory perceptions of the everyday and the ways in which these are shaped in response to the daylight conditions that characterize spaces of habitation. I have also explored how affective, emotional, and sensory responses to the distinctive ways in which daylight falls on particular landscapes are appraised and represented. To provide a sense of the pervasive impact of light on space, place, and landscape, I have discussed such cultural representations and creative practices as travel literature, photography, film, and painting. I have also looked at how artists have endeavored to elicit awareness of the light of place and landscape through site-­specific installations, and how staged events similarly respond to moments in which light temporarily transforms place. Finally, I have explored how daylight has been harnessed and sculpted by architects as a crucial building material, deployed to produce diverse aesthetic, symbolic, and sensory effects, and create relationships between external and interior spaces. These discussions have reinforced my arguments in the previous chapter about the affective, emotive, and sensory impacts that light bestows on place, by looking at how specific, situated sensory attunements, affects, and meanings resonate in artistic representations of landscapes and cultural practices. I have suggested that the responses to daylight in these spheres and how it is deployed and represented remain dynamic and continue to adapt to new ideas, technologies, and cultural contexts.

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Part II Illumination

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Chapter 3

Electric Desire: Lighting the Vernacular and Illuminating Nostalgia

Illumination and Its Discontents It is difficult to imagine the radical transformation that accompanied the introduction of gas and subsequently electric illumination in spaces formerly shrouded in gloom. Anke Gleber (1999, 31) captures the scale of this change: “an increase in the numbers of pedestrians, the extension of streets that can be passed at night, the amount of time that can be spent in the streets, and the quantities of stimuli that one may expect to experience, multiply to an extent that until then was unimaginable.” Yet as technology advanced, by the second half of the twentieth century such lighting had become an institutionalized part of everyday life. An infrastructure of illumination was established in places, serviced and maintained by professional experts, regulated by administrative strictures, and shaped by vested commercial interests. The excitement stimulated by the arrival of illumination as it colonized the city was replaced by mundane awareness of its commonsense existence. The phrase disenchanted night, coined by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988), appositely characterizes this pervasive banality. In this chapter, I discuss how initially inventive, novel, and diverse illumination culminated in technocratically regulated homogeneity, poor design, and overilluminated nocturnal environments. Yet I argue that in recent times, a recognition of this aesthetic poverty and illuminated excessiveness is leading light designers to adopt approaches that deploy lighting in imaginative, innovative ways. This situation is fluid, multiple, and dynamic, and because the styles, designs, and technologies of contemporary lighting are expanding, I cannot offer a comprehensive account. Instead, I identify recent significant developments in lighting that chime with broader contemporary spatial, social, and cultural processes. 53

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Since the advent of gas and electric illumination, light design has been subject to aesthetic disputation and often compromised by commercial, political, and infrastructural imperatives. Indeed, according to Dietrich Neumann (2002, 7), “no other artistic medium of the twentieth century has crossed the boundaries between art and commerce, technological display and utopian vision, easy entertainment and demagogic politics as effortlessly as this.” There have been several excellent historical accounts of the multistranded, contested installation of illumination in urban streets, commercial districts, and sites of pleasure and spectacle (Schivelbusch 1988; Nye 1992; Jakle 2001; Otter 2008; Brox 2010; Koslofsky 2011). These texts elaborate on how the development of gas and electric lighting utterly transformed space, producing an ever-­expanding illuminated nocturnal geography, although the process was uneven, patchy, and varied. In many European cities around 1700, cafés and taverns became popular sites of nocturnal socialization, as the nighttime became more extensively occupied for leisure and business (Brox 2010). The simultaneous evolution of shops, theaters, and pleasure gardens fostered the rise of social activities and the display of conspicuous consumption, boosting the commercial reputation of cities. By the end of the seventeenth century, reliable street lighting had been established in Amsterdam, Paris, Turin, London, and Hamburg, as darkness was “slowly transformed from primordial presence to a more manageable aspect of life” (Koslofsky 2011, 78). Yet lighting’s expansion was initially slow and uneven. During most of the nineteenth century, the poor still used tallow candles and rushlights, the rich beeswax candles. Later, more expensive, cleaner, and brighter spermaceti candles, together with oil for lamps, were produced by the whaling industry, and other fuels included the “oil of grape pips, flax or olives” (Attlee 2011, 38). As innovation accelerated, lamps fueled by paraffin and kerosene were succeeded by gaslight and, subsequently, in the 1880s, by the incandescent electric bulb, itself gradually improved with the replacement of carbon, tungsten, and subsequently ductile tungsten filament, and innovations such as fluorescent and neon lighting. This more advanced illumination stimulated the creation of extensive street lighting, illuminated shop windows and advertising, and the illumination of private houses, light blazing from their windows rather than flickering candlelight. Since then, successive technologies of artificial illumination have continuously pushed back the frontier of darkness (Melbin 1978). The advancement of illumination is synonymous with the industrial age, during which it produced “a new landscape of modernity whereby the

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city was ostensibly transformed from “a dark and treacherous netherworld into a glittering multi-­coloured wonderland” (Nasaw 1999, 6–­8) and darkness “expelled into the realm of prehistory and mythology” (Schlör 1998, 57). Rather than remain in their homes from fear of the dark, people flooded into urban streets in search of amusement, spectacle, commerce, and new forms of conviviality, as the early modern city became a venue for new ways of living. The urban nightscape was progressively and radically transformed, with its “great white ways,” illuminated driving spaces, night shopping areas, and entertainment districts, and bohemian and leisure quarters grew to satisfy a range of desires after dark (Straw 2014). Pedestrians constituted a new kind of audience, with the advent of the illuminated shop window affording a new kind of theatrical realm (Schivelbusch 1988). This reconfiguring of space by illumination contributed to spatial defamiliarization, uncertainty, and fascination, constitutive aspects of urban modern experience. Artificial light has generated illusory effects through which the city has been transformed into a phantasmagorical realm, abounding with “the shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and insubstantial” (Collins and Jervis 2008, 1). In the nocturnal city, distances can be difficult to ascertain, illuminated buildings appear to float amid gloom, areas of darkness are impregnable to sense making and become sites for speculation, and scale and proportion are deceptive. The modern city thus became “a perceptual laboratory,” an oneiric city, “exhilarating and disorienting to its inhabitants as its space was opened up to transgression, fantasy and experimentation inhabitants” (McQuire 2008, 114–­20). Charles Dickens (1869, 76) captures the fantastic quality of gaslight as he gazes out across the River Thames during one of his many night walks through London: The river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.

As electric illumination spread throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was, as Chris Otter (2008, 10) stresses, a largely contingent and improvisational process. The uneven replacement of gas lighting by electric lighting exemplifies how the history of illumination is characterized by “multiple, overlapping perceptual patterns and practices rather than singular paradigms.” Most lighting developments were typified by ad hoc arrangements, local imperatives, competing technological systems and designs, and disparities in wealth and power. This produced “a

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teeming, muddled multiplicity of visual practices that cannot be reduced to one hegemonic modality” in which new and older forms of illumi­nation coexisted (254–­55). There was no dominant approach to lighting, and though successive technologies were presented as improvements to those they superseded, electric construed as superior to gas lighting, floodlighting better than strings of bulbs in highlighting shape and mass, and backlit panels worthier than neon, technologies labeled obsolete lingered in spaces of poor investment. In the American city in the first half of the twentieth century, John Jakle (2001, 57) remarks, the “night was made visually complex in its illumination because of the various overlapping technologies,” with oil and gas lighting persisting along with numerous forms of electric lumieres. Some regard the ongoing visual complexity as problematic. For instance, in summarizing what he regards as the poverty of contemporary illumination, the light designer Mark Major (2015) critiques the illegibility of London’s nightscape. He complains that a chaotic jumble of different forms of light are subject to no overall plan or effective regulation. Major points to the overlayering of different technologies and styles for more than a century, as well as a lack of distinctively local designs tailored to characterful areas and an overweening focus on functionality at the expense of aesthetic quality. He also identifies overillumination, an excessive contrast between bright and poorly lit areas and disproportionate commercial lighting. Accordingly, he maintains, it is often difficult to discern the boundaries of unique spaces and districts, and to perceive iconic features amid a clutter of illumination. The uncontrolled, unplanned array of illumination consequently means that a sense of place in areas that possess distinctive identities by day is not similarly imparted at night. The illegibility and disorientation produced by the lighting that exists, and the dearth of any distinctive lighting to highlight byways, buildings, and other features, or act as attractions in themselves, render places placeless. However, other critics lament that much of the diversity of illumination has been ironed out. For example, Jakle (2001, 15) contrasts earlier nocturnal visual complexity with the intensified saturation of space with electric light: “Much of the romance and mystery of the urban night evaporated, street lighting, in its excess, no longer capturing and holding attention as spectacle.” Moreover, he contends, the earlier modern city also contained gloomy areas that have now been vanquished by the colonization of illumination. Where once people moved between dark and illuminated areas, the diverse qualities of darkness, shadow, glow, and sparkle that formerly

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characterized urban experience have been replaced by a uniform glare. The aforementioned dream-­like, fantastical qualities of the city have dissipated as a homogeneous wash of light spreads across space. A consequence of the overriding imperative for the enhancement of mobility, security, and commerce, prevalent overillumination has culminated in the production of nocturnal “blandscapes.” Consequently, light designers and urban planners have expressed disenchantment toward the ubiquitous use of sodium vapor lighting and “its nearly monochromatic yellow light” that bestows on “people and things a pale, washed out appearance,” banishing darkness and subsuming everything within an ambient glare (Jakle 2001, 84). Within this yellow-­pink wash, architectural features and colors become indistinguishable, and contrasts diminish to flatten visual appearance. Enveloped in the flood of light, more inventive and sophisticated forms of illumination are unable to stand out, cannot add charm to the nightscape. Moreover, this generic, functional illumination uses far more power and is costlier to maintain than LEDs. A further inadequacy is that contemporary illumination is excessive in extent and luminosity. According to the International Dark Sky Association (2012, 7), 22 percent of electrical energy use in the United States is expended on lighting. Of this, 8 percent is used for public outdoor lighting, residential lighting accounts for 27 percent, industrial use 14 percent, and commercial lighting 51 percent. A medley of common practices contributes to this superfluity, with five kinds of light pollution identified by campaigners against excessive illumination (see Geogise n.d.). There is “light trespass,” where light invades space from a neighboring source, and “light clutter,” in which confusing and chaotic forms of lighting infest the nightscape, confounding orientation and legibility. “Overillumination” is characterized by unnecessary lighting, such as lights left on in unoccupied domestic rooms, empty office blocks illuminated, and commercial advertising ablaze through the night, colonizing time and space (Gallan 2014). “Glare” refers to contexts in which the contrast between dark and light is too great and can dangerously cause temporary blinding for pedestrians and motorists; “skyglow” describes the expansive aura of illumination that leaches into the sky from cities. Besides producing poorly designed environments, such unnecessary illumination is attributed to malign effects on human health and devastating consequences for animals. Pertinently, the emergent dissatisfaction with this overillumination is soliciting a reappraisal of gloomy qualities and a quest for spaces suffused with varying levels of darkness.

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Dissatisfaction with prevailing forms of illumination is nothing new, and historically, proponents of different technologies, practices, and ideologies have often been ranged against each other. The Japanese scholar Junichiro Tanizaki regarded electric illumination as signifying “the divide between the cultures of East and West,” since “as opposed to candlelight or lamplight . . . it erases distinctions between discrete spaces, making difference invisible” (quoted in Mizuta 2006, 343). Similarly, in the early years of its introduction, many considered that electric lighting was too glaring in comparison with the gaslight it replaced (Beamish 2015). With specific regard to electric lighting, Ernest Freeberg discusses how “City Beautiful” campaigners in the early twentieth-­century United States decried the commercial signage pervading the cityscape as vulgar, self-­interested, and disorderly, though opponents labeled such critiques elitist and reactionary. These campaigners wanted to “create an orderly and aesthetically harmonious system of streetlamps,” with a focus on a craft approach to electric light, featuring “civic lighting systems” with “buried wires, sculpted streetlamps, and parks and public buildings washed in strong white light” (Freeberg 2013, 253–­56). This more communally oriented “civic republicanism,” Freeberg argues, contrasted strongly with the exuberance of bright colors and flashing commercial signs that signified free market liberalism and pleasurable consumption, and a distinctively American “technological exuberance.” These approaches, according to Freeberg, were subsequently supplemented by standardized measurements, techniques, and procedures that developed under the influence of growing numbers of light professionals. Having briefly summarized some of the contestations that resonate among those who design illumination and the key objects of dissatisfaction that circulate around the mooted deficiencies of lighting, for the rest of this chapter I explore creative approaches to illumination by professionals and nonprofessionals. First, I investigate how LEDs and bespoke lumieres are being deployed to enhance the distinctive qualities of places, before considering the upsurge in applications of sustainable illumination, notably forms of smart lighting that respond to particular conditions in real time. Second, I look at how lighting is being innovatively used to reenchant places, focusing on public artworks and installations, and the use of sensors, computing techniques, and lighting that reveal the human and nonhuman rhythms of place. Third, I examine vernacular forms of lighting, contending that these vital, popular cultural practices underpin the persistence of traditional, place-­specific designs, and emphasize that contem-

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porary illumination does not solely revolve around technical and aesthetic advancement. I also look at how vernacular expressions serve as a basis for community-­led collaborations with artists and designers. Finally, I explore how lighting is entangled in broader concerns about the speed of cultural and technological change, and as in other fields, is prompting a turn to nostalgia, through which older forms of illumination are aesthetically reappraised. More Subtle and Sustainable Lighting Growing dissatisfaction with contemporary illumination has been accompanied by the emergence of technologies and techniques that offer new possibilities for light design. The adoption of governmental and professional strategies to develop more sustainable, equitable, and imaginative nightscapes is spreading, as exemplified in the charter for urban illumination of the international association of lighting designers, Lighting Urban Community International (LUCI). The charter encourages responsible lighting strategies that pay attention to environmental and social impacts, advocating sustainable illumination and “reducing social and economic inequalities.” It also foregrounds creative approaches to the enhancement of local heritage and identity to produce nightscapes that are more distinctive. Further, the charter asserts that cities “must aim at creating comfortable light environments and protect darker areas” and “make starlight visible again” (LUCI n.d.). Such perspectives have also been adopted by some local authorities, as at Eindhoven, where a lighting master plan specifies that “a respect for darkness is a key tenet,” leading to a reduction in illuminated advertising later in the evening (Art in the Open n.d.). Lyon’s Fête des Lumières has served as the catalyst for the wholesale reenvisioning of everyday lighting across the city. The local government has used the accumulation of expertise that the festival has engendered to inform a particularly sophisticated lighting plan initiated in 1989 and updated in 2004 and 2007. Ecological and aesthetic considerations have been integral to these programs (Schulte-­Römer 2012). Besides illuminating significant buildings and squares, lighting has spread to most parts of the city, creating distinctive zones with varied hues, intensities, and levels that highlight specific byways, vegetation, and architectural features. Key aims are to produce “differentiated atmospheres,” diversity of approaches, crea­tive experimentation, the development of new technologies, responsiveness to residents, social inclusion, citywide coherence, and the reduction of energy consumption and light pollution. The consequent

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sedimentation of expertise has resulted in educational and training programs and global consultations for local light designers, consolidating Lyon’s reputation as an innovative venue for lighting know-­how (Brätt et al. 2010). Consequently, Lyon’s nightscape is not one of generic lighting but of multiple colors, different intensities, and peculiar surprises. One notable element in Lyon’s light design is the illumination of usually unheralded architectural features or those that because they are too high or blend with a multitude of other colors and textures cannot be clearly perceived. The skillful spotlighting of these specific features makes them stand out against the backdrop of a dark sky, allowing a visual appreciation that would be impossible by day. Finials, statues and gargoyles, chimneys, alcoves, and stone engraving are theatrically made available to perception. Such highlighting is especially accentuated because most street lighting is below roof height and the sky remains dark and star filled, providing a suitable backcloth. In the past, urban lighting plans have tended to produce nocturnal environments flooded with light, mimicking the expansive daytime illumination of sunlight. In Lyon, the experience of the nighttime city differs dramatically from that of the daytime, with diverse illuminations that honor place-­specific architecture, atmosphere, and activity. The tendency to flood space with light has also characterized the illumination of symbolic buildings, where facades have been subject to powerful floodlights to make structures stand out from their surroundings but minimize appreciation of detail, texture, and form. More subtle approaches are replacing this crude light saturation with techniques tailored to specific architectural qualities, as exemplified by the 2013 revamp of the illumination of Durham’s medieval cathedral. Where formerly 53 floodlights projected powerful beams on the building’s surface, 247 separate low-­energy LEDs now pick out key aspects. Highlights and shadows bring the three-­ dimensionality of the building to attention, and the eye is diverted to specific features such as the Norman towers, tracery, round and pointed arch windows, pilasters, turrets, and carvings. Moreover, illumination reveals areas of roughness, smoothness, and unevenness, allowing a fuller, multisensual appreciation of the textures of stone. The effect of the new scheme is not simply to spark a simple recognition of a local icon in the nightscape but to offer a more thorough understanding of the cathedral’s architectural, aesthetic, and historical complexity. These subtle designs are increasingly complemented by the advent of more sustainable, responsive forms of illumination. Writing in 2004, Peter Davey (2004, 47) remarked that it was “ironical that we generally continue

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Figure 7. Durham Cathedral, 2014. This recent lighting scheme has replaced the previous deployment of indistinguishable floodlighting. The scheme encourages a more substantive appreciation of the cathedral’s architectural, aesthetic, and historical complexity. Photograph by the author.

to pursue quantity at the expense of quality in illumination when technological development is offering so many new opportunities.” However, over a decade later, new lighting technologies are now being intensively applied. Political and economic imperatives to introduce more sustainable lighting have stimulated the replacement of incandescent electric bulbs with lower wattage bulbs, notably more energy-­efficient light-­emitting diodes (LEDs), in numerous public, domestic, and commercial spaces. Other new techniques that shield luminaires to reduce ambient glare contain light within discrete illuminated realms. The obligation to develop less costly, more environmentally attuned illumination is also inspiring the evolution of responsive lighting. Though in its infancy, and hindered by city dwellers’ habituation to continuous illumination and persistent fear of the dark, lighting technology that reacts to information in the built environment will undoubtedly become more prominent in the future, for the prevalence of lighting that shines through the night irrespective of utility is an obvious area in which energy can be reduced. Accordingly, new developments in

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sensor technologies and digitally controllable LEDs has enabled more flexi­ ble lighting to emerge, smarter forms of illumination that adjust to surrounding environmental information and do not require the physical intervention of humans to switch off, dim, or brighten intensity. Certain sensors detect motion, triggering light to shine in the presence of people and dimming when there is nobody around. Esben Poulsen et al. (2012) investigated how patterns of human mobility could shape the illumination of a town square in Aalborg, Denmark. The positions, numbers, and speed of the people moving on the square were monitored by computer analyses of thermal images taken from three cameras that responded by dispensing illumination of changing hues and intensities. Similarly, the light designer Sabine de Schutter has tracked movement and numbers of people in a Berlin park to devise an adaptive system of illumination through which the concept of Crowd Darkening was realized. When few people were in the park, lighting levels rose to enhance feelings of security. When numbers of park users increased, light levels fell in response. Besides minimizing light pollution, a sense of well-­being and a comfortable public setting in which to socialize developed. Other responsive innovations include the use of detectors that measure levels of available daylight and subsequently adjust the levels of illumination supplied by luminaires. In interior settings that possess plentiful skylights and windows, the available daylight varies according to time of day, season, and weather conditions. When the sunshine renders the inside bright, there is little need for supplement by artificial light, but when this decreases, artificial light switches on. In the future, lighting receptive to motion and levels of daylight is likely to be intensively deployed on roads, where a lack of traffic or ample daylight renders illumination unnecessary, but sensors will provide artificial light when conditions become too gloomy or vehicles and pedestrians are detected. In addition, interior lighting can be customized, adapted, and programmed according to individual desires. Though certain forms of smart lighting alleviate the need for humans to continually reflexively monitor light conditions, other networked techniques are being developed that allow a much greater human input into shaping illuminated environments. Lighting levels, intensities, colors, and combinations can be altered in accordance with users’ desires, as part of an increasingly networked world. Here, elements of codesign can be encoded in lighting systems to provide greater agency in devising mood, color, and luminosity, using intelligent controls through responsive phone and computer devices rather than the light switch. As such engagements become

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integrated with everyday life as part of portable sensor and network technologies, they extend human capacities to act within flexible systems to manage diverse forms of lighting. In chapter 5, I further discuss responsive lighting at light festivals, where temporary installations encourage inhabitants to become involved in the codesign of the city’s lightscape. Such a capacity also exists in more enduring contexts, for instance at Luminous Nights, installed across the facade of the modernist Commonwealth Bank Headquarters in Sydney’s Darling Quarter in 2012 and billed as the world’s biggest interactive light display. Through advanced LED systems, light is manipulated via two digital touch screens, allowing colors and patterns to instantaneously transform the appearance of the building, providing a vast canvas that extends across 150 meters and the four levels of the building’s two discrete parts. The installation indicates the possibilities for allowing citizens to design the mood and look of cities. In addition to these spectacular public deployments, smart applications are being developed for manipulating light in private homes. More radical challenges to currently inflexible lighting systems are being investigated by light designers and activists. In challenging the fixity of the urban lighting grid and summoning up earlier modes of mobile light before the advent of widespread artificial illumination, Susanne Seitinger

Figure 8. Luminous Nights, Commonwealth Bank Headquarters, Sydney. The potential for interactive engagement by citizens with urban illumination is exemplified by this large installation, in which light can be manipulated via two digital touch screens. Photograph by the author.

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et al. (2010, 115) experimented with “light bodies,” portable lights carried by participants that changed color and intensity through vocal and tactile stimulation. They explored the “communicative, social, and playful aspects of hand-­held lights,” producing a performative dimension to urban inter­action. A more politically engaged mode of imprinting presence on nocturnal urban space has been developed by the Graffiti Research Lab through the L.A.S.E.R Tag System (LTS). This is described as an open source “Weapon of Mass Defacement” to perform “projection bombing,” mobilizing projectors, cameras, and lasers to transmit designs onto the surfaces of buildings and monuments from a distance of several hundred meters (Susik 2012). Eyebeam, the organization within which this subversive technology has been devised, a nonprofit body established to encourage experimentation at the interface of art and technology, asserts that the LTS can be used by citizens to “post their art, messages and propaganda on a scale previously monopolized by advertisers, governments, major media, and other cultural tyrants” (Eyebeam 2006). Finally, moves to produce more ecologically attuned environments and diminish energy expenditure are not only dependent on technology that develops more sustainable illumination. Other emerging techniques will transform the nocturnal world, such as the application of a light-­ absorbing dust that contains bioluminescent material and reflects light energy absorbed during the day. With no energy costs once it has been installed, this material obviates the need for electric lighting and can be applied to any building or road to give it a phosphorescent glow, potentially reenchanting nocturnal space and allaying fears about safety. Pro-­Teq, a UK company based in Virginia Water, Surrey, already produces a product called Starpath that harvests the sunlight and emits a soft blue light at night (Vincent 2013). Many of the emergent technologies discussed above are at the prototype stage yet clearly have the potential to transform the appearance of the nocturnal environment, contributing to a gathering multiplicity of illuminated forms and light sources, and augmenting the experience of dark space in new ways. Other embryonic practices reduce the homogeneity of lightscapes and reinstate a sense of place by imaginative highlighting of overlooked textures, forms, and features. Moreover, by engaging with citizens in the codesign of illuminated space and decentering the grid as sole source of light, dark space may become far more available to experimentation by designers, artists, and laypersons.

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Enhancing Place with Light Making Iconic Sites, Revealing Hidden Rhythms A key way in which illumination can be imaginatively deployed is by installing arresting designs that enrich a sense of place. Evolving digital technologies have inspired the design of a plethora of mediatized displays that transform the facades of buildings, offering new points of attention for urbanites. For instance, between 2005 and 2007, diverse forms of information were transmitted at the SPOTS installation in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, not only “movies, graphics and animation sequences” but also “commissioned artworks that transformed the building’s shell into a communicative membrane” (Edler and Edler 2015, 175). The application of digital technology on a much larger scale is evident in the gigantically scaled Symphony of Lights, which animates Hong Kong’s waterfront skyscrapers, boldly broadcasting civic identity in a spectacle synchronized to music, “flashing and dancing in a frenzy of light and colour” (Petty 2015, 167). These points of attraction and convergence animate cities with media screens and mesmerizing illuminated extravaganzas, certainly contributing to a more variegated urban nightscape but perhaps lacking depth and local relevance. Accordingly, I now focus on three works that provide a more enduring contribution to place, installations less concerned with bedazzling onlookers but with subtly conjuring up other times and places, and showcasing the kinds of identities that regeneration strategies often overlook. Chris Burden’s Urban Light, situated on a previously bland area of paving alongside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and adjacent to the busy Wilshire Boulevard, provides a striking example of the creative reimagining of place through illumination. The installation comprises a dense arrangement of 202 restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s that were used across Southern California. The seventeen different types of lamp are painted in uniform gray and clustered together in a grid. The installation conjures up a vanished world of public space and an ornate street vernacular that has been eclipsed by more functionally oriented urban lighting that rather than illuminate sidewalks is primarily devised to facilitate the speedy transit of motor vehicles. The beauty of these earlier designs rebukes such functional illumination. By gathering these older fixtures, Urban Light honors what has been designated as outmoded and, in so doing, makes strange the space in which it is situated. At night, the blaze from the solar-­powered lights illuminates the ground, the walls of surrounding buildings, and the

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lofty palm trees that rise above it, reenchanting the plaza in front of the museum. This lures pedestrians and those in passing cars, providing a convivial public space in which newly married couples pose for photographs, fashion shoots are staged, kids play, tourists congregate, and teenagers hang out, besides serving as a movie location. In making an unusual maze, a dense grid through which the body can weave, Burden’s piece induces a seething venue of activity on a previously lifeless nocturnal space, a renewal of public presence that stands out on the often-­deserted streets of Los Angeles. In fashioning a novel attraction imbued with cordial inter­ action, the artist critically addresses the dearth of public spaces in the city. Illumination can also be deployed to reenchant abject spaces. For example, the underground confines of Sunderland’s rail station, below a shopping precinct in the center of the town, serve as an unimaginative example of 1960s architecture and planning. With low ceilings and minimal decor, the station formerly provided no distinguishable characteristics, with little to distract passengers or make them feel comfortable as they waited for a train in this unadorned, subterranean environment. However, since 2010, a glass block wall, extending for over 140 meters, faces the busy platform 3 composed of individual LED units that form an animated display. Platform 5, designed by Jonathan Hodges for the Jason Bruges Studio, features the continuous movement of thirty-­five ghostly forms—­mothers with prams, dog owners, couples lingering, people lugging heavy receptacles or wheeling suitcases, and single passengers strolling—­that are randomly selected to produce ever-­new patterns of movement along a virtual platform. Behind the light wall, long gone and hidden from view, was a disused platform to which these ghostly forms pay testimony. Besides honoring the passengers of yesteryear, the installation also mirrors those of the present day, foregrounding the overlooked movements they make as part of an everyday choreography that contributes to the poetics of everyday space. This evocative piece underscores the impact that illuminated works of art can have in the most unprepossessing places and advances the ways in which light can be used to augment experience and serve as an integral element in architectural design. Lamp for Mary is an installation of a very different kind, a pink streetlight fitted in 2010 that illuminates an inner city laneway, Mary’s Place, in Sydney. The light stands at a site at which a woman named Mary was attacked and raped by two men in 1996. One year after the brutal assault, the historically notorious, shadowy laneway, previously Flood Lane, was renamed Mary’s Place, and later, the lamp, created by the artist Mikala

Figure 9. Chris Burden’s Urban Light, Los Angeles, 2013. Burden’s geometric arrangement of historic street lamps has produced a vibrant, interactive public space in which people play, take photographs, and critically reflect on the dearth of similar public realms in car-­dominated Los Angeles. Photograph by the author.

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Dwyer, was installed. The light offers several practical and symbolic effects. First, it lights up the formerly gloomy passage with its warm glow, conveying a sense of safety for those moving through at night, enabling the space to be reclaimed by women and those of diverse sexual orientations. In addition, it remembers the woman who was subject to the unprovoked, violent act, publicly recording the episode and her resilience as a survivor. In the broader context of the attack, it also commemorates the legacy of violence against members of the nonheterosexual community and its continued occurrence, as is underlined by the textual inscription at the site. The form of the lamp is important in disrupting expectations about the kinds of functional streetlights routinely used to illuminate alleys such as this. Its unusually large size, glowing pink color, and similarity to a domestic lampshade blurs distinctions between private and public space. Lamp for Mary publicly commemorates an event and an identity that diverges from the grand memorializing structures used by the state to immortalize the usually male cast of statesmen, scientists and explorers, military heroes and monarchs, figures who are being decentered in contemporary forms of memorialization (Samuel 1994). Different sensory and affective engagements are solicited by novel illuminated installations that acknowledge the often-­concealed or invisible energies, rhythms, and processes that (re)constitute places. New computer technologies display patterns of light in response to sensors that detect nonhuman and human rhythms that circulate within buildings or swirl around and through the environments to which they belong. The early use of such technology inheres in the design of Tokyo’s Tower of Wind, constructed in 1986 by the architects Toyo Ito and Kaoru Mende, a tall, cylindrical structure that serves as an exhaust air outlet for the underground vehicular tunnel of the Aqua Line. Possessing a perforated aluminum coating that reflects the sky during the day, the structure’s appearance at night is utterly different. Deploying computer sensors, mirrors, one thousand LEDs, twelve neon rings, and more than thirty floodlights, it transforms the functional building into an interactive landmark. Data that record differing wind conditions and city sounds are transferred into electromagnetic pulses to create an ever-­changing architecture of light and color that responds to the complex city surrounding it. Further exemplifying such applications, Pierre Auboiron (2010) discusses the work of Yann Kersalé, who organizes such technologies to animate usually unseen processes. Auboiron refers to the red lighting across the roof of Lyon’s Opera House, which alters in response to the levels of human

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activity inside the building. Sensors and cameras record peoples’ movements to reveal an “inner phenomenology” that brightens during night rehearsals and well-­attended concerts and pales when few people inhabit the building. Kersalé has also arranged translucent rods in the garden of Paris’s Branly Museum. Connected to the database of a nearby weather center and programmed to react to the surrounding levels of heat and cold, the rods produce a glare that colors the thick surrounding vegetation—­white when it is chilly, pale blue when the temperature is mild, and intense turquoise on balmy evenings. Nonhuman energies were also revealed in Kersalé’s 1992 installation at the Saint-­Pierre Cathedral in Nantes, where he organized 1,900 blue spotlights across the facade. The intensity of these diffuse patches varied according to sensors in the bed of the Loire River that captured the flow of its current and tidal surges from the sea. Finally, MIMMI (Minneapolis Interactive Macro-­Mood Installation), a large, curvilinear, inflatable light sculpture suspended thirty feet from the ground, was positioned at the Convention Center Plaza in Minneapolis in 2013. Using textual analysis to identify key words from a four-­thousand-­ word database, the sculpture endeavored to reflect the mood of the city as ascertained by local tweets and text messages gathered through open-­ source technology. Besides the emotional content of tweets that might reflect responses to the fortunes of the city’s sporting teams or weather, the sculpture also possessed motion detectors that responded to human movement on the plaza. This information was transmitted to LED lights that glowed blue if feelings were cool or movement sparse, or blazed in bright pink when positive emotions and large numbers of people predominated. In conveying these moods in real time, the illuminated sculpture offered a timely reminder that in an era of ubiquitous computing and flows of digital communication, the relations that inhere in space are expanding within and beyond cities, reconfiguring urban experience. Vernacular Illumination and Collaborative Design The attention gathered by the advent of sophisticated, responsive, and sustainable forms of illumination is apt to obscure the persistent role of both innovative and traditional expressions of vernacular lighting. It is crucial to emphasize that public illumination is not merely circumscribed by the “cool” and fashionable, nor is it solely the provenance of lighting professionals; it also draws its significance from popular rituals, craft traditions, and vernacular creativity. This is especially apparent in fairground and carnival illumination that

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follows a ludic aesthetic that arose during the early expansion of electric lighting. Gary Cross (2006, 365) describes how at the Luna Park and Dreamland fairgrounds at New York’s renowned Coney Island, a fantastic architectural array of towers, domes, and minarets were “outlined by electric lights, giving these strange oriental shapes an even more mysterious and magical air at night.” This art of the fairground tended to celebrate a “garish overabundance” that connoted pleasure, fantasy, and release from work for visitors (Feigel 2009). Such lighting persists in older forms, as at Sydney’s Luna Park fairground, and is updated to form new extravagant displays such as the nightly laser show at Copenhagen’s venerable Tivoli Gardens. Its most extensive contemporary manifestation occurs throughout September and October each year at the enduringly popular Blackpool Illuminations in northwest England and attracts more than three million visitors. First established in the 1920s, the Illuminations has expanded for nearly six miles along the seafront, featuring an eclectic mix of lasers, neon, fiber optics, LEDs, searchlights, and floodlighting. Serial designs attached to roadside lampposts extend in sequences along the seafront road, illuminated trams glide alongside the promenade, and large, animated tableaux flash and pulsate. Designs are both representational and abstract, diverse in their animation, color, and form. The different icons, motifs, forms, and styles that have varied from year to year constitute an astonishing compendium of changing tastes and trends in popular culture. Though enormously diverse, common themes include celebrity, film and television, myth, the “exotic,” modernity, toys, folktales and nursery rhymes, Blackpool scenes, nature, glamour, national identity, science fiction, historical scenes, and the supernatural. Collectively, these representations testify to the protean, dynamic qualities of British popular culture. For the past seventy years, the illuminations have been produced at the resort’s purpose-­ built department, where only tangential attention is paid to broader design trends. This is a locally embedded craft workshop in which design traditions persist through the accumulation of knowledge and skill. The department honors continuity and tradition, but also persistently produces innovative illuminations (Edensor and Millington 2013). Blackpool has also recently been the venue for a large, ambitious display, Illuminasia, which expands the ancient Chinese art of lantern making. Exhibited across several large halls in the town’s Winter Gardens complex are designs made from silk fabric, steel rods, and various luminaires. The spectacle, described as “The World’s Largest Indoor Illuminations Experience,” uses thirty-­five thousand lamps, twenty-­seven tons of steel, and twenty thousand acres of fabric, and employed fifty-­six Chinese craft

Figure 10. Luna Park, Sydney, 2014. This is a contemporary remnant of the fantastical designs of 1930s fairground illumination. Photograph by the author.

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workers for three months (Illuminasia 2014). Divided into discrete chambers, display themes include terracotta warriors, an enthroned emperor, a model of the town’s famous tower, an undersea world, world wonders, and most dramatically, the “Land of the Giants” a garden replete with insects, birds, and plants that dwarf visitors. Combining elements of national identity and heritage, global attractions and fantastic renderings of the nonhuman world, the display is a multisensual feast that glows with rich colors and luminous forms. In supplementing the locally produced designs of the annual illuminations, Illuminasia exemplifies how vernacular cultural forms from elsewhere increasingly enter places through global flows to expand the diversity of light design. Vernacular illumination is also created for display during festivals and popular processions, at which myriad forms enchant the night with symbolic or commemorative meanings: the illuminated floating-­basket candles devised for the Thai festival of Loi Krathong, the progressively more elaborate creations paraded at Chinese lantern festivals, the expanded use of fireworks for an increasing variety of occasions, the jack-­o’-­lanterns paraded at Halloween, the glow sticks wielded in dance clubs, and the sky lanterns used to celebrate significant occasions. Christmas is particularly associated with specific kinds of illumination, with lights arranged around public and private Christmas trees and city streets. In recent times, a particularly spectacular effusion of seasonal lighting (El Alumbrado) completely alters the streets, squares, and parks of Medellín, Colombia. An ambitious collaboration between professional designers, technicians, and inhabitants, millions of lights produce swathes of shimmering color to foster a powerful sense of festivity and celebration across vast areas of the city. Site-­specific forms of vernacular light design are emerging in smaller-­ scale collaborative practices between socially conscious light designers and artists, and local inhabitants of disadvantaged urban areas. In seeking to augment the qualities of public space, the outcomes of these engagements register the presence of these residents in innovative ways that bypass homogeneous design, providing exemplary prototypes that suggest how neglected environments might be enhanced. For example, in their Light Castle project, the Finnish artists Anne Salmela and Anna Turunen create light installations in cooperation with residents of housing communities by inserting colored lights in rooms whose windows shine onto the street, and by placing personalized designs on these windows’ surfaces. Participants choose lights, colors, photographs, drawings, and messages that collectively radiate into the streets after nightfall, transforming familiar neighborhoods. The light designers who constitute the Social Light Movement (n.d.) also

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Figure 11. World Monuments, Illuminasia, Blackpool Winter Gardens. The globalization of the vernacular craft of Chinese lantern making constitutes the world’s largest indoor illuminations. Photograph taken by and courtesy of Steve Millington.

practice this co-­creation of the nightscape. While the foremost objective of recent light design has been to focus on regeneration projects that aim to upgrade centers, heritage districts, cultural quarters, and other prestigious urban areas, more marginal and deprived realms have been neglected. Conversely, in housing estates and residential districts in uncelebrated, largely working-­class towns, illumination is often characterized by functional fixtures and dreary sodium lighting, with little attention paid to aesthetic qualities. In addressing this, the Social Light Movement mobilizes the slogans “Light is a right not a privilege” and “People before places.” The group has created a network for lighting designers to collaborate on improving lighting for those who lack access to good quality illumination. Overriding objectives are to design well-­lit environments; involve communities in light design; encourage other designers to work in similar environments; educate public bodies, architects, and planners about the benefits of good lighting; and promote responsible energy use. These aims are exemplified in a social lighting project carried out in the neighborhood of Sundholm, in southeastern Copenhagen, often depicted in popular media and planning documents as socially deprived, economically

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challenged, and physically degraded. In 2011 the Social Light Movement initiated TRANSITION, a string of site-­specific lighting projects that aimed to contest the area’s stigmatized image by inviting local residents to co-­create lighting designs. In one scheme, Home Sweet Sundholm, traditional street lamps were changed into cozy standard lamps to disrupt understandings of space as unsafe or depressed, fostering a more homelike ambience. A second initiative was Satellight, through which the satellite dishes on the façade of an apartment block were illuminated with different colors, providing a subtle, alternative impression of fixtures often identified in Danish media as ugly signifiers of segregated areas, or “ghettoes” (Ebbensgaard 2015). Imaginative approaches to illumination, combining vernacular and artistic designs, have the potential to subvert common and stereotypical readings of low-­status areas while enchanting the experience of place. And the production of vernacular forms that ignore fashionable design trends imprints marginalized identities on space, reminding us that light is not merely concerned with “good taste” but can be deployed to celebrate festivity, tradition, and locality. Such lighting also reveals the intensification of the postmodern blurring of popular and high culture, where the formerly impugned qualities of the vernacular are valued in themselves for their vitality, warmth, and humor. Indeed, such attributes may be sought and celebrated by artists, and appreciated as an integral part of cultural innovation (Edensor et al. 2009). Nostalgia and Illumination The final manifestation of the dissatisfaction with contemporary illumination I discuss is the tendency to look backward, to reappraise earlier forms of lighting that have been devalued. This nostalgic impulse is part of a broader social response to the speed of change and to aspects of contemporary culture regarded as impersonal and placeless. This propensity is expressed through the consumption of retro fashion, the expression of wistful sentiments about what is disappearing, desires to hang on to traditional or local forms, and visits to neglected, supposedly outmoded illuminated landscapes such as at Blackpool. Nostalgic responses have frequently accompanied historical transformations in lighting technology, the replacement of older designs prompting a deep sense of loss for what has suddenly been rendered obsolete. Indeed, Otter (2008) reveals that new forms of illumination have rarely been uncontested. He draws attention to complaints about the glaring dazzle of early electric lighting and how peoples’ desire for privacy and subtlety trumped bureaucratic visions of illuminated omniscience. Freeberg

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(2013) discusses how in the early days of electric lighting, “colonial revivalists” nostalgically advocated a partial return to the use of candles. Jane Brox (2010, 89) similarly shows how urban dwellers, in rebutting modernist hyperbole about progress, expressed a nostalgia for gaslight shortly after its replacement by electric illumination, opining that “its intimacies seemed all the more desirable, and people instinctively clung to its lingering form, the ghost in the mist.” More specifically, Joachim Schlör (1998) describes the acute loss felt by many Parisians when illumination returned after the blackouts of World War I. More recently, the inhabitants of Istanbul lament the slow demise of the practice of mahya, through which lights strung between buildings, often connecting the minarets of mosques, compose words and phrases (Türeli 2015). Contemporary nostalgic urges are directed toward an assortment of superseded lighting forms and practices. An area of retail is currently devoted to a plethora of vintage, “heritage,” and antique commodities, including clothing, foods, home furnishings, and popular culture that connote the feel and style of earlier eras, and lighting is no exception. For several decades, the external walls of British suburban houses have been affixed with coach lamps, mimicking the carriage lamps of the nineteenth century, and in recent years, that symbol of the 1960s, the lava lamp, has been reinvigorated as a fashionable item, along with plasma globes from the 1980s and Angle­poise lamps. Neon is particularly salient in considering the reappraisal of formerly outmoded styles. As Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein (2015) show, neon exploded across the commercial centers of the United States, Europe, and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, its vibrant curvilinear signs symbolizing a streamlined future of speed and efficiency. Yet after World War II, this lighting technology was largely replaced with plastic fronted signs illuminated from within by fluorescent tubes, and neon became associated with the dilapidated areas of cities, signifying seediness and squalor. However, it has now become the preserve of specialist designers and rehabilitated by numerous artists who favor its plasticity, clear lines, and glowing colors (Ribbat 2011). It has also become enchanted with a nostalgic aura. The neon signs of Las Vegas, once considered tawdry and lurid, were inextricably linked to the base desires and shallow pleasures associated with the allure of that city. Today, however, the downtown area is adorned with the commercial neon of the postwar years to form an outdoor museum, and on the outskirts of the city, a large collection of unrepaired signs gather in the Neon Boneyard, where they await a second life (Houston 2013). Neon museums are also present in Edmonton, Philadelphia, and Warsaw.

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Research carried out at Blackpool Illuminations shows that most visitors esteemed the lights because they evoked a sense of nostalgia (Edensor 2012; Edensor and Millington 2013). This was grounded in the repeated visits made by families over several decades. Though the vast display annually introduces innovative technologies and designs to complement recurrent illuminations, most visitors enjoy the familiar fixtures because they foster a sense of continuity over time. These nostalgic sentiments are also part of collective family experience, grounded in the convivial tradition of annual trips through which a shared compendium of memories is cultivated. The traditional elements and popular cultural references of the display resonate with these recollections and foster a connection with the past. Chic and sophisticated aesthetics are not sought. Indeed, many visi­ tors appreciate that in foregrounding traditional themes and styles, the resort asserts its immunity to broader design fashions and tastes, reproducing a sense of its own uniqueness. Local designers are thoroughly attuned to these desires. Such nostalgic sentiments do not only surround festive lighting. In Berlin, residents of the city’s Kreutzberg, Neukolln, Schoneberg, and

Figure 12. Neon Car, Las Vegas, 2010. This is one of the many attractions from the 1950s that collectively constitute the city’s Neon Museum, through which the historical and aesthetic value of neon has been reappraised. Photograph by the author.

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Figure 13. Tableau, Blackpool Illuminations, 2013. This is an example of the many forms of vernacular illumination at the resort’s annual illuminations, displays that connote nostalgia and celebrate motifs from popular culture in contradistinction to contemporary modish light designs that signify a “cool” style. Photograph by the author.

Charlottenburg districts are campaigning to preserve the gas lamps that illuminate their streets, arguing that they constitute cultural heritage. Initially maintained to “minimize West Berlin’s dependency on electricity supplies that could have been blocked by the surrounding socialist state,” most gaslights date from the 1950s but are a redesign of a popular 1920s model (Schulte-­Römer 2014, 309–­10). In 2007 Berlin’s local government decided that all streetlights should be electrified in order to cut public energy costs and reduce carbon emissions, and a rolling program of replacement commenced in 2012. The scheme involves substitution with LED luminaires that mimic the gaslights, though campaigners argue that these are easily distinguished and lack the illuminated qualities afforded by gas. Residents’ sense of everyday familiarity and comfort clashes with the technocratic understandings of lighting professionals and planners, and both sides consequently articulate different notions of what constitutes a “public good.” Though their opponents characterize resistance to technological advance as uninformed, sentimental, and nostalgic, the campaigners

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skillfully articulate a sophisticated assortment of ideas in publicly communicating their arguments. They protest that this historical technology has not been properly acknowledged as a “cultural asset” and is productive of a distinctive aesthetic in which the warm glow and gentle hiss create a unique atmospheric and sensory environment. Even forms of illumination that may seem irretrievable can be re­ enchanted with a nostalgic allure. Excursions organized to satisfy the desire to witness and photograph industrial illumination is emerging as a popu­lar tourist pursuit in Japan. The phenomenon, Kojo Moe (factory love), emerged after the publication of a photographic book, Kojo Moe-­F Background Reference Book, featuring nocturnal images of illuminated chemical plants, foundries, cement works, and gantry cranes (Ken and Tetsu 2007). Private tour operators and city municipalities have developed numerous bus and boat tours to meet demand, especially in the heavily industrialized coastal zones of Yokohama and Kawasaki, and tourists include many younger visitors as well as older people. As contemporary son et lumière spectacles, tours focus on industrial megastructures, satiating contemporary desires for the industrial sublime in a not-­yet-­post-­ industrial context. Nostalgic desires also focus on more archaic forms of lighting that conjure up a vanished past and offer an aesthetic, spiritual experience unfamiliar for those accustomed to modern illumination. Durham Cathedral regularly holds an evening event titled “Free to Be,” in which the interior is illuminated with candlelight. Upon entering the cathedral, visitors can experience an atmosphere staged to inspire prayer and meditation, and become absorbed in large expanses or smaller spaces, soliciting a historical impression of how people experienced this same space when candles and rushlights were the only source of light after dark. The flickering flames capture the mellow tones of stone and reveal ancient surfaces, pocked and hollowed through the ages, as well as smoother, carefully chiseled newer sections. Deep shadows focus attention on tracery, niches, and sculpture. Nostalgia is often characterized as a sentimental looking back to an imagined, idealized past that takes little account of progressive historical developments, part of a conservative, defeatist refusal to face the onward rush of technology and social change. However, its meanings are multiple and can accommodate progressive, even utopian impulses, as well as regressive stances and indulgent melancholia. The examples above suggest that nostalgia can mobilize a critical perspective that interrogates claims about style and status, and articulates a skepticism toward the advantages

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that new technologies and commodities promise. As Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley contend, negative appraisals of nostalgia suggest that any attempt to deal with the inevitable loss that accelerated modern change brings is born of a refusal to face the present and future. Such construals fail to take account of concerns that things of value may be lost and lamented, for nostalgic expression may recognize “the value of continui­ ties in counterpart to what is fleeting, transitory and contingent” (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 923). The above practices resist tendencies toward cultural amnesia and guard against the seductiveness of the continuously new. In challenging the taste makers who pronounce on style and value, they revalue the formerly vilified and find beauty in that pronounced abject. Berlin’s inhabitants seek to preserve the uniqueness of place, its familiar sensations and atmospheres, and visitors to Blackpool’s Illuminations reassert shared values of familial conviviality and working-­class experience grounded in popular culture in opposition to the imposition of fashionable styles from elsewhere. These engagements make sense of the present by drawing on the past, which might serve as a source of potential and aspiration containing the seeds of future utopias. Nostalgia may thus be mobilized as a critical tool and here serves to highlight the multiple values, identities, and meanings that circulate around illumination (Strangleman 2013). Conclusion In this chapter, I have summarized how illumination, initially experienced as enthralling and fantastic, has become subject to widespread disenchantment. Though always uneven in its distribution, tendencies toward standardized homogeneity, poor design, and excessive glare have prompted crea­tive responses from professional designers and ordinary people. I have interpreted these reactions and developments by identifying four processes that signal the emergence of new, innovative, and reflexive approaches to lighting. I surmise that these approaches will lead to far more culturally and aesthetically diverse lightscapes, greater sustainability, a multiplicity of interactive and environmentally responsive lighting, a wider acknowledgment of vernacular creativity and supposedly outmoded designs, and a more conscious focus on producing site-­specific illumination, whether in lighting plans or in the installation of artworks. In this chapter I have also touched on the baleful effects of illumination, especially the unequal distribution of good quality lighting, the saturation of space with commercial lighting, and the production of normative, unvarying blandscapes.

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Chapter 4

Caught in the Light: Power, Inequality, and Illumination

I ll u m i n a t i o n always materializes power. As is evident in the grand displays organized by monarchs to bedazzle subjects, the medieval mobilization of a night watch to survey those out after dark, and the unequal distribution of premodern candles, illumination has always been entangled with power in numerous ways. The immense expansion of illumination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reconfigured the play of power, and in contemporary times, new authoritative expressions and their attempted subversion are articulated through lighting. The provision, design, and installation of illumination, its exploitation in scrutinizing the activities of citizens, continuing inequality in the distribution of lighting, the cultural values encoded in particular designs, and the production of forms of common sense that “naturalize” everyday illumination all mark power in distinct and changing ways. In examining these different expressions, this account resonates with the different conceptions of power advanced by Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière. The discussion demonstrates how singular theoretical accounts are inappro­ priate, for expressions of power are multiple, gather in strength and disperse, and are contested in diverse ways; out of such struggles, new meanings and uses emerge. As Sean Cubitt (2013, 312) asserts, there is no intrinsic meaning to light, but “an evolving set of meanings negotiated between scientists, engineers, manufacturers, marketers, architects, interior decorators, urbanists and their business and domestic customers” as cultural and historical contexts change, mutate, and adapt. A processual analysis is essential, for light is never deployed in passive spaces that await sudden transformation but reproduces power relations, is resisted, or used in alternative ways. In investigating the multiple ways in which power is expressed, I identify four key themes. First, I explore the overt use of lighting in the surveillance, 81

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policing, and control of bodies. Second, I look at how lighting inscribes vari­ous inequalities across space. Third, I discuss how cultural capital is mobilized to assert judgments around aesthetic value and (lack of) taste. Fourth, I examine how those who have the power to distribute the sensible forge the normative arrangements through which we apprehend everyday illuminated space. To conclude, I look at the emergent technology of urban screens as a form of illumination that reveals contemporary alignments of power, suggesting that various theoretical interpretations draw on different conceptions of power. Order, Surveillance, and Oppression through Illumination The use of surveillance to regulate what happens after dark has unremittingly been mobilized as a form of disciplinary power, producing subjects that fall under a gaze or glare. Even in times before widespread illumination, urban authorities frequently adopted stringent measures to regulate nocturnal activity. In many cities and towns, a night watch was organized to guard against intrusion, suspicious activity, and the perils of fire. To further minimize the presence of nocturnal interlopers, city gates were bolted shut after nightfall to forbid entry and chains stretched across streets to impede those who ventured outside. Though tradesmen such as bakers were exempted from such strictures, others were apprehended, especially women, subject to the suspicion that they were prostitutes (Brox 2010; Ekirch 2005). Yet the advent of illumination did not diminish authoritative endeavors to control movement and particular practices in nocturnal space; instead, it prompted new techniques and procedures through which urban populations were managed. Despite the desires of technocrats, illumination has never been all-­pervasive, and this has intensified suspicions that those outside its glare are up to no good. Accordingly, a broader range of figures emerged—­radicals, bohemians, criminals, and prostitutes, for instance—­who were in need of surveillance. The development of lighting provided a way to control nocturnal public morality, and imperatives to order the night have continuously inspired the development of new technologies to channel bodies and focus on particular subjects and spaces. Such strategies are invariably contested. The early adoption of reflector lanterns in bourgeois areas, according to Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988, 95), laid the ground for the endorsement of electric lighting in the later nineteenth century as “a guarantor of public morals, safety and order.” Writing about Paris in the nineteenth century, Schivelbusch illustrates how the standardization of public street lighting in

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accordance with Baron Haussmann’s radical urban reconstruction represented an attempt by the state to replace the chaotic diversity of private lanterns, torchbearers, and gas lamps. But it also explicitly aided the policing of the city’s rebellious communes and was understood by their inhabitants as a threat to their nocturnal existence, provoking waves of lantern smashing and erecting “a wall of darkness  .  .  . protecting an area from incursion by government forces” (106). Elsewhere, an ongoing struggle persisted between the authorities and those who felt threatened by this intensified surveillance, exemplified by the harsh penalties imposed on those smashing lanterns in seventeenth-­century Vienna, which could include cutting off a hand (Koslofsky 2011). Focusing on Victorian England, Chris Otter (2002, 2008) discusses how illumination was part of an array of technological applications, including transport and sewage, that drastically enhanced urban safety, mobility, and health. Crucially, however, Otter contends that illumination was also part of a bourgeois reordering of the city in which air pollution, lack of lighting, few windows, overcrowded buildings, and teeming urban spaces were ameliorated by illumination, more rationally planned thoroughfares, the use of glass through which sunlight could penetrate, more spacious settings, clearer vistas, and cleaner air. Also integral to this restructuring was the biopolitical reordering of people through surveillance, which accompanied an intensified vigilance toward the self as well as others. Respectable bourgeois citizens supposedly “mastered their passions in public spaces conducive to the exercise of clear, controlled perception: wide streets, squares and parks” wherein “sight can prevail, civil conduct be exposed to view and those eminently Victorian qualities of reserve and distance maintained” (Otter 2002, 3). The subsequent installation of technical infrastructures that organized points of inspection were inscribed with the power for some to scrutinize the presence and practices of others. The normative force of these institutionalized technologies made “normal and durable the autono­ mous, rational judging, distant practices of the liberal subject,” although they were inevitably unevenly applied and enforced (259). Otter insists that extensive illumination was thus part of a moral and political reordering of the city, particularly since promoting the self-­ government necessary for liberalism as a technology of rule was dependent on producing sociosensual environments. For instance, the dense slums in which a sense of touch was required for navigation in so gloomy an environment was conceived as synonymous with an “ailing sensoria” and “ethi­ cally dangerous.” It was regarded as imperative that these cramped and

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dark realms should be replaced by wide, uncluttered, and brightly illuminated spaces. Significantly, the pervasive darkness in these “rookeries” was conceived as a sign and cause of moral, intellectual, and physical depravity, “physically incompatible with all forms of dynamism: material and intellectual, individual and social” (67). The gloom was further believed to magnify “disconnection and social dislocation” as well as the “circulation of opinion” (84). Authoritative aims not only included the regulation of behavior but also the ordering of the senses, deemed essential to a properly functioning, rational, and moral subject. Stunted visual capacities were aligned with moral failings, and darkness was understood as inimical to individual, ethical, and social progress. As I discuss below, such strategies exemplify how a “redistribution of the sensible” is sought to “normalize” space and sensation. The depiction of the gloomy slums of “darkest London” resonate with colonial discourses about “Darkest Africa” and the Indian cities of “dreadful night” that perpetrated absolute distinctions between the colonized realm and modern, “civilized” colonizing Western powers, narratives satu­ rated with moral and social judgments that reinforced such binary geographical constructions. For instance, Gail Low (1989, 245) conjures up colonial representations of the Indian city, as “the out-­of-­bounds city where the living and the dead intermingle” and in which “everything exists in a chaotic state of intermingling: a carnival of night and a landscape of darkness, noise, offensive smells and obscenities.” The spread of electric lighting thus served as a metaphor for the rigorous distinctions between the civilized colonial self and the primitive colonized other, supplementing classificatory schemes to identify cultures, races, and natural histories that “naturalized a global order of dominance balanced on the knowledge and moral worth associated with darkness and lightness” (Palmer 2000, 162). Accordingly, the electric grid became a key icon of Western colonial modernity as well as an ordering technology, and the illumination that it brought symbolized the dissemination of Christianity, scientific rationalism, and cultural superiority that was part and parcel of the “civilising mission” (Winther 2008). Electric illumination was a material demonstration of this power, a metaphorical and physical bringing of light that might “astonish” the natives through its spatially transformative properties (Freeberg 2013). Despite these colonial practices and discourses, the lurid fantasies of otherness assigned to the unilluminated cities of the colonized were saturated with suppressed libidinal desires. For the dark places outside the colonial quarters condemned as disorderly, licentious, and sensuously excessive lured European colonizers to sample their delights after nightfall.

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La Tour de Soleil, a structure that was never built but was a competition rival to the Eiffel Tower, exemplifies the early grasp of the promise for illumination to survey dark urban space. This giant tower would have been equipped with powerful electric lamps to transform the Parisian night into day, making all available to scrutiny. This surveillant use of illumination persists in the use of searchlights beamed from helicopters during nocturnal disturbances. More mundanely, the quality of street light is a key factor in recording images by CCTV cameras: insufficient illumination is likely to render such images unclear and legally inadmissible as evidence. Security lighting is routinely installed in private homes to keep intrusion at bay, frequently part of a broader apparatus that includes cameras to record intruders. Besides these deployments, glaring lights have also been positioned as an intimidating, overt display of political authority, as at Warsaw’s Palace of Culture during the communist era, where extensive searchlights turned the building into a beacon of power, emanating the glare of state control over citizens (Gilbert 2000). Like the five luminescent ruby stars installed in the 1930s on the five towers of the Kremlin when it was an iconic bastion of Soviet power, and which continue to shine, the palace materialized state authority (Buckler 2015). Robert Williams (2008, 518) focuses on how darkness provides a cloak for alternative and oppositional practices that temporally disorganize space, contributing to an ongoing contestation between ordering and disordering impulses: “Because of its transgressive meanings and societally harmful uses, darkness threatens to deterritorialize the rationalizing order of society . . . when it obscures, obstructs, or otherwise hinders the deployment of the strategies, techniques, and technologies” of regulation. Typically, searchlights have countered the use of dark space to carry out politically oppositional practices or seek refuge from the law. Yet such techniques are increasingly replaced by technologies that do not require light to detect bodies. Surveillance systems use motion-­detecting technologies to alert security guards to the presence of people in dark space, helicopter surveillance deploys thermal-­imaging techniques to detect bodies, and night vision equipment gives pursuers an advantage in moving and perceiving. Whereas a powerful beam of light provides a visible threat to undercover activity, these recent technologies may locate those under scrutiny without their awareness. Accordingly, with the advent of these hyperpanoptical techniques, the idea that darkness provides cover from policing has lost some salience, though emergent modes of avoidance attempt to bypass them. And when they are displaced by “legitimate” revelers and commercial interests, nocturnal habitués seek out more marginal spaces. The

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nighttime city is thus subject to a shifting spatial politics whereby certain spaces are contingently commodified, regulated, claimed, and abandoned by different parties. Besides scrutinizing citizens, pursuing suspects, and monitoring activities, lighting is used to deter particular activities. In urban neighborhoods that host nightclubs and bars, powerful lighting with cold color temperatures can be deployed to dissuade late-­night revelers from congregating outside in large numbers, producing an environment in which lingering feels uncomfortable (Shaw 2014a). In central Glasgow, another regulatory technique involves the installation of lumieres that become brighter in response to higher levels of noise, revealing potential trouble spots to police. And the exclusionary methods through which light is deployed to marginalize certain subjects from busy urban areas is exemplified by the installation of ultraviolet light in public toilets to ensure that heroin addicts are unable to locate the veins into which they inject the drug (Bille and Sørensen 2007). These strategies are supplemented by more overt techniques of affective and sensory disorientation directed toward those imprisoned and under military attack. This includes rational, architectural designs seemingly inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, in which all prisoners are available for scrutiny from a central observation point, with the backlighting of their cells always revealing their presence while ensuring that those observing them are unseen. Contemporary high-­security prisons position glaring lights around their perimeter, imposing a continuously illuminated environment within which hypersurveillance occurs, ensuring that these facilities stand out from the surrounding landscape, as captured by Stephen  Tourlentes’s (2012) stark photographs of American prisons. The affective potency of these illuminated sites features in Phillip Lachenmann’s (2008) video work SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby), in which a California correctional institution in the Mojave Desert is filmed from a distance for twelve minutes as the sun goes down. As the all-­encompassing light of the blue hour fades from the landscape, the blaze of the prison lights becomes dominant: the lighting of security and surveillance replaces the sublime luminosity of the late afternoon sky. As the scene darkens, myriad lights from airplanes that crisscross the sky start to appear. Lachenmann digitally superimposed these airplanes, filmed as they arrived at the airports of Los Angeles, Frankfurt, London, and New York via flight corridors from 2002 until 2005. This intensified accumulation of airplanes coasting high above the inmates, all suffering solitary confinement, contrasts with the abject

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illumination amid the nocturnal blackness of the desert within which they are incarcerated. Particularly obvious here is the minimally decorated interrogation cell, lit with a single central bulb that shines harshly on the suspect, weakening psychic resistance to questioning. Such logics are also used to deny detainees the possibility of sleep, a well-­worn torture technique deployed by the US military in the current “War on Terror.” A sense of helplessness and compliance is promoted by lighting cells with very high intensity lamps, perhaps supplemented with loud music, and sometimes alternating the glare with prolonged periods of utter darkness to confuse sensory and perceptual experience (Crary 2013). The ability to manipulate perception of light and dark space and to see in the dark through advanced technology also provide a basis for gaining advantage in war situations. In discussing the strategies designed to confound the aerial gaze of German bomber pilots over Britain in World War  II, James Robinson (2013, 1056) focuses on the skillful practice of camouflage through which the Earth’s surfaces at night were “transformed and manipulated to further subvert the inhibited visual capabilities of the human body,” thereby gaining an important military advantage. In concealing vital installations and sites of production, British camoufleurs developed a sophisticated understanding of the different levels of light and climatic conditions under which varied dark topographies were perceived from the air. Accordingly, methods involving the use of netting, textured paint, and fragmented patterning were devised to reduce shine and conceal obvious structures. Conversely, the power of some to see in the dark where others cannot is exemplified by the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. special ops forces, who possessed night vision equipment with which to make their way through his Pakistan compound. The overwhelming affective and sensory effects of light—­ and darkness—­on the battlefield is explored by Pip Thornton’s account of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where she served as a soldier in the British Army. Thornton explains how the exercise of “Light Discipline” by the British Army endeavors to restrict light on the battlefield, so that signs such as the lit cigarette do not give position and presence away. The ability to perceive in the dark with night vision and other sensing equipment can facilitate the ability to move behind enemy lines and leave evidence of presence, unnerving opposing forces. Techniques to illuminate soldiers’ bodies so that they are visible to those with advanced night vision goggles further advance these asymmetries of vision. More crucially, the power to mobilize

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light to intimidate and destabilize civilians and military opponents was used as part of the allied strategy of “shock and awe,” through which a “nightly firework display of bombing, burning oil wells, strobing tracer fire and industrial strength illumination” produced powerful affective impacts (Thornton 2015, 13). Other techniques of aggressive illumination on Iraqi battlefields included giant lumieres attached to parachutes that lit up large areas, vanquishing darkness and intimidating those under attack, and the use of laser light from above to pinpoint targets. The Unequal Supply of Illumination Light also materializes spatial inequality in demonstrating who has wealth, power, and status, marking out the unequal distribution of financial, social, and political power across space in numerous ways. The display of great numbers of candles by aristocrats and wealthy merchants in me­dieval times exhibited their privileged rank, while fireworks extravaganzas demon­strated their largesse. Modes of spatial and social distinction accelerated with the emergence of extensive urban illumination. As I discussed above, the elevation of emergent bourgeois sensibilities in Victorian London informed the production of a geography characterized by the inscription of inequality across urban space, the poor reduced to the inhabitation of gloomy realms that symbolized backwardness and moral deficiency. New regimes of spatial ordering implemented a calculated invisibility, illuminating that judged worthy of being seen but consigning to darkness those features and districts conceived as less deserving of visual attention. In nineteenth-­century Paris, Martin Bressani (2015, 30–­31) points out, “a topography of wealth and prestige” was marked by an inequality in the distribution of gas lighting; the continued use of candles in poorer realms contrasted with the extravagantly illuminated commercial and wealthy neighborhoods in which “brightly lit boulevards were appropriating the old aristocratic privilege of an overabundance of light.” Similarly, Peter Baldwin (2004, 752) notes how early nineteenth-­century urban Americans “gradually perceived a new order in the nocturnal landscape” with the advent of gas lighting, with areas of ethnicity and class sharply deline­ ated by contrasts in lighting, mapping imaginaries of safety and squalor onto the city. As gas lighting became outmoded, the emergence of electricity reinscribed illumination as a sign of status and wealth. As Otter (2008, 335) points out, artificial light rapidly became “a symbol and a determinant of urban differentiation.” Joachim Schlör (1998, 65) concurs, observing how the brighter the light in the centers, “the more

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starkly do the outlines of the darker regions stand out.” This is underscored by Jane Brox’s (2010, 104) contention that the brightly illuminated shop windows, signs, theater entrances, homes, and pubs in the commercial center contrasted with those realms regarded as “another country,” the dark neighborhoods of the poor, in which “old light retreated into the far streets and lesser known neighbourhoods, disregarded and disparaged in relation to the new.” In the nineteenth-­century, gas light spawned the arrival of coffeehouses, clubs, and theaters, sites that constituted new spaces of gendered and class exclusion, and this distinction was reinforced by dazzling shop windows with their large panes of glass and sumptuously arranged goods devised to appeal to wealthy consumers. Practices of illumination thus created “new centres of power and new margins of exclusion” (Koslofsky 2011, 280). The use of lighting as a means of distinction extended into the twentieth century as “a technology whose conspicuous consumption was a status symbol for both individuals and towns” (Harrison 2015, 3). And such inequalities extended spatially as the electrification of suburban and rural places occurred decades after that of urban centers. By drawing on the city of Rocky Mount in North Carolina, Conor Harrison shows how the selective installation of electric lighting was central to the development of racialized urban space. While illumination was promoted in commercial areas and white districts to prevent crime, it was deemed unnecessary for black areas. Illumination metaphorically signified progress and modernity, in contradistinction to the gloom of African American and primitive societies, and thereby naturalized spaces of “black dispossession and white privi­ lege” in which investment and property values decreased and increased respectively (14). Accordingly, as Scott McQuire (2008, 124) submits, a “new ‘map’ of the city” was produced in which particular buildings were floodlit and other sites were cast into darkness, effectively manufacturing a reduction in urban complexity, flattening out the city’s rough edges and less prestigious areas. This new urban cartography, materialized through the organization of light and dark, has taken many forms and continues to change, but invariably remains inscribed with power. In late nineteenth-­century urban America, companies vied to gain contracts to supply illumination, and the contest was especially intense between Edison and Westinghouse. As cities competed, then as now, to claim their place in the vanguard of modern technology and economic development, the establishment of monopolies occurred in many areas (Cubitt 2013).

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David Nye highlights the battles between different advocates of lighting systems in the United States, especially between those who promoted the installation of dazzling arc lights and supporters of the subtler illumination offered by incandescent bulbs, and between the civic-­minded champions of sophisticated, subtle lighting and their commercially oriented opponents who wished to spread illuminated advertising. These clashes reveal the persistent tensions that have played out ever since, “between public and private lighting and between collective and individualistic visions of the urban night landscape” (Nye 2015, 31). According to Nye, this battle was won by those who deployed the commercial lighting that has come to dominate urban America, a lopsided situation that persists with the provision of only minimal regulation to moderate the excesses of private illumination. As such, an “edited landscape” emerged that expressed the values of private enterprise and the needs of automobiles, while a dearth of effective lighting for public spaces ensured that elsewhere, “much was erased and obscure” (43). Subsequently, in the absence of strong planning regulations, a disordered illuminated nightscape, endlessly recomposed by new additions, has emerged, much to the frustration of urban planners who, according to Nye, “inspired by the great expositions of the time sought an orderly legible city” (44). A geographical inequality in the distribution of urban illumination remains, with unevenness in brightness, quality, and purpose. The luminosity of streets in American cities perpetuates a spatial hierarchy shaped by imperatives to facilitate traffic flow and the imputed relative importance of main streets, arterial roads, secondary business streets, and varieties of domestic streets (Jakle 2001). In addition, symbolic buildings are highlighted against the contrastingly dark backdrop of less-­esteemed buildings and districts. Structures associated with local or national state functions, heritage sites, monuments, and memorials reinscribe the cultural identities and values of the powerful on space. With the conspicuous illumination of high-­rise corporate buildings, a now-­common urban spectacle initiated by the floodlighting of New York’s Singer building in 1907, images of illuminated high-­rise skylines symbolize the glamour of the modern city, and the illuminated corporate signs that glow atop such structures produce a rather generic nocturnal text. Janet Ward (2001) also writes of the surface culture produced in Weimar Berlin, a prototypical, spectacular urban setting in which expansive electric advertising dominated the nightscape, a lightscape that she contends prefigures the even more depthless landscapes of the contemporary city. Urban lighting continues to obscure the city’s

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rough edges, the industrial ruins, marginal retail districts, ghettoes, and slums, in producing a selective aesthetic ordering of the nightscape. The illuminated commercial effusions of the great white way have reached their apogee in the iconic settings of Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing, London’s Piccadilly Circus, Bangkok’s Patpong district, and New York’s ever more sign-­crowded Times Square. The spectacular development of illumination in Shanghai underscores its reputation as a growing cosmopolitan city, a center of international finance and corporate capital. This echoes the city’s prerevolutionary reputation as a meeting point between east and west when the Bund, the city’s colonial waterfront, was also emblazoned in lights, manifesting a different kind of power (Lin 2015). Sandy Isenstadt (2015, 84–­85) discusses the surfeit of signification that saturates Times Square, a space crowded with illuminated signs and images that compete for attention. According to Isenstadt, these “linguistic particles translated into pulses of light” produce layers of repeating rhythms and “random juxtapositions” that in their profusion create an impression of illegibility. Yet though they constitute a mesmerizing onslaught of signifiers, sensations, and affects, they speak “the native patter of free enterprise

Figure 14. Patpong, Bangkok, 2013. This contemporary saturated urban nightscape is chaotic in design but also enthralling in its excess. Photograph by the author.

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itself,” signifying “frenzied sales pitches” and championing “artful assertion over reflective synthesis” in articulating the American preoccupation with making a profit. Such sites are thus encoded with an aesthetic and an ideology of unhindered, unregulated commerce. By contrast, the instantiation of a highly regulated, centrally planned nocturnal landscape as a key part of widespread electrification symbolized the power of state rule in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Electric light became particularly emblematic of modernization, a highly visible contrast to the gloom of czarist rule (Buckler 2015). Yet such centralized systems of illumination have more recently symbolized the failure of state socialism and mark emergent forms of symbolic power, as Dietrich Neumann (2015) discusses with regard to West Berlin. Here, bright white lighting, suspended fluorescent illuminations, advertisements, and brightly lit facades were consciously deployed to project a sense of prosperity and freedom in contrast to the gloomier sodium illumination used in communist East Berlin. The different nightscapes of the formerly separated two parts of the city remain clearly evident on aerial photographs. Besides symbolizing the importation of technological advancement and modernity to colonized spaces, illumination also marked the rigorous spatial distinctions that colonizers sought to impose by designing “dual cities.” Organized into native quarters and European cantonments, the latter was typified by rationalized systems of pervasive illumination while the former was generally consigned to darkness (Frasch 2012; Winther 2008). These colonial inequities produced a legacy that continues to shape unequal access to illumination. Jonathan Silver (2015) shows how the multi­scalar metabolic flows through which electricity used to be diverted to European quarters in Accra, Ghana, reverberate in contemporary infrastructures that provide unequal access to electricity and lighting. In highlighting how these segregated, fragmented, and fractured networks produce configu­ rations of power that resonate across Accra’s lightscape, he draws attention to neoliberal programs of structural adjustment that have privatized the previously state-­run electricity supply, generating a splintered urbanism in which there is selective access to power. Surges in demand for electricity from middle-­class households to supply their air-­conditioned, concrete homes often leads to disruption, yet because such households can afford to purchase individual generators that provide an alternative energy source, the effects of the blackouts are bypassed, and their houses remain illuminated. For the poor, however, there is no recourse to such technolo­ gies, and their economic endeavors are impeded by the outages. Yet the

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plunging of their districts into darkness stimulates collective practices to guard against crime and purchase candles. Itohan Osayimwese (2015) similarly discusses how the notorious failure of the former state power supply, NEPA, prompts many Lagosians to seek alternative sources of illumination, inventively improvising off-­grid practices in making do. The unequitable access to power and lighting also occurs in rural India, where rural electrification and illumination programs are often diverted to other purposes or used to improve the environments of the rural elites charged with their implementation. Cross (2013) contends that relatively cheap solar-­powered light, though much vaunted, lacks user adaptability and easily available replacement parts, and has therefore not resolved the problem of the widespread use of unsustainable, potentially dangerous kero­sene lighting appliances. Ankit Kumar (2015) shows how in the Indian state of Bihar, the presence of a light in the bangla (porch) at the threshold of village dwellings signifies the honor and hospitability of the household and the social status afforded by the ability to purchase a lamp. The quantity and quality of illumination also demonstrates household status during weddings and other ceremonies, reinforcing existing hierarchies. Such prestige is also broadcast by the use of ghee from cow’s milk, conceived as sacred, to produce illumination during Hindu rituals. The ability of the powerful to impose lighting on space is also manifest in spectacular state ceremonies that deploy illumination to convey ideological meanings, extending affective and sensory impressions among large crowds. A particularly malign expression of such power is exemplified by the notorious Nazi rallies at Nuremberg for which Albert Speer designed “cathedrals of light,” a form of Lichtarchitektur that evoked immense classical columns fashioned by 130 giant searchlights. Housing tens of thousands of precisely situated followers, these three-­dimensional forms provided a venue for spectacular mass choreographies of bodies, a potent spectacle that generated awe and reverence among participants toward the Nazi project and its leaders (Khodadad n.d.; Hagen and Ostergren 2006). National tradition is also inscribed at Australia’s annual Anzac Dawn Service at the National War Memorial in Canberra, an event commemorating the sacrifice of soldiers during World War I that forms the center of Australia National Day. Shanti Sumartojo (2015) focuses on how the skillfully organized interplay of light and dark is mobilized to intensify shared national belonging (2015). Darkness is deployed to both symbolize the early morning offensive operations of the Australian troops at Gallipoli and intensify the sense of belonging to an indistinguishable crowd of tens of

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thousands, gloomy effects amplified by the contrastingly bright images projected onto the memorial’s façade. Inequalities in lighting are also evident in the different subjectivities to which particular appeals are directed. Margaret Petty (2014) shows how throughout most of the twentieth century, the commodification of Ameri­ can domestic lighting became entangled with highly gendered cultural meanings and material relationships, not to mention a normative middle-­ class, white national identity. Part of a much broader reconstruction of female roles through advertising, educational, and mediated advice about domestic tasks and feminine qualities, marketing campaigns aimed to persuade women that their beauty and glamour, as well as their home-­making skills and personalities, would be disclosed if they chose the appropriate domestic lighting. Correct light, it was claimed, would accentuate the colors and shapes of domestic interiors and enhance the appearance of those within its glow, and would facilitate the efficient application of makeup. Female consumers were advised to become skilled at deploying illumination to maximize enhancement of their own assets; in the 1950s, this involved the purchase of pastel-­colored incandescent bulbs to improve the appearance of complexion. Petty considers that electric light, “with its dazzling, transformative properties, provided a context that encouraged, and perhaps even legitimized, the increasingly performative nature of American femininity in the early decades of the twentieth century” (10). Battles over Taste The unequal spatial distribution of light is not the only way in which status and distinction are expressed with regard to illumination. Bourdieu’s (1986) work on the establishment of class identities around the acquisition of cultural capital foregrounds the articulation of critical judgments about the aesthetic qualities of a host of items and practices. In recent decades, a significant cultural practice through which groups and individuals distinguish themselves from others is the making of authoritative assertions about the constituents and parameters of “good taste.” The emergence of popular lifestyle television programs, websites, and magazines that advise consumers about how to improve their environments and bodies has promoted an influential group of cultural intermediaries, namely, lifestyle media experts, who pronounce on the virtues and failings of styles of home decor, garden design, clothing, body shape, and diet (Bell and Hollows 2005). This has made new resources available through which an expanding range of objects may be championed or disparaged.

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Emerging out of particular forms of habitus, common sense, and shared class values, these judgments are often intertwined with critical assumptions about other moral virtues and deficiencies that particular stylistic expressions are thought to elucidate, and this includes assessments of public, festive, and domestic forms of illumination. Here I provide two examples, based on previous research, of how two particular forms of lighting typically produced and consumed by working-­class Britons have become a target for middle-­class and professional critique, even vitriol. First, the originally American habit of cladding the outside of dwellings with bright, animated, and colorful lighting at Christmas was later adopted in the UK, largely by the inhabitants of working-­class housing estates, in contradistinction to the broader range of geographical locations that typifies American displays. This practice transforms the nocturnal appearance of these low-­key realms, introducing swathes of color and light that dramatically announce the presence of displaying households in a way that would be unfeasible in daylight. The displays contain various elements: festive inscriptions, Christmas trees, Father Christmas, stars, sleighs, snowmen, bells, and parcels, and depictions of toy trains, ladders, helicopters, airplanes, hot air balloons, teddy bears, large inflatables of cartoon characters, flashing lights, and pulsing rope lines. Householders are not especially concerned with displaying “tasteful” decorations. What matters is that the overall effect is cheerful, festive, lively, amusing, and expresses goodwill. In addition, the displays are rarely organized according to any design scheme. As one displayer stated, “I just throw it up . . . it is that there, that goes there and that will do. It depends what I pick up . . . I just fling it up: ‘Will it fit there? Well, fine’ ” (Edensor and Millington 2009a, 112). The displays can be conceived as part of an “economy of generosity” (Edensor and Millington 2009b). Nearly all the householders interviewed during the research claimed that they illuminated their houses for their children, neighboring children, and the surrounding community. This, it was asserted, was an expression of the spirit of Christmas and was further illustrated by several displays that included receptacles to collect money for charity. Though some found the annual task of installing the lights onerous, they felt compelled to continue because neighbors who enjoyed the displays would inquire about when they were to be switched on. The responses of these householders refute widespread notions that these Christmas illuminations are a competitive effort to assert status within the neighborhood. Yet despite the evidently generous, lighthearted, festive, and community-­spirited dispositions that motivate the displays, they

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Figure 15. Christmas illuminations, Manchester, UK, 2010. Intended to celebrate festive, light-­ hearted, and community-­spirited values by householders, such illuminations have been heavily criticized by those concerned to champion their contrastingly “good taste.” These class-­making expressions of distinction attribute many wider personal deficiencies to those who display “chav bling.” Photograph by the author.

have become objects of derision, scorn, and disdain. Critics rail against the lack of taste demonstrated by displayers, often using words such as tacky and tasteless, and sometimes refer to how more suitable, toned-­down colors ought to be employed. Crucially, criticisms are attributed to moral deficiencies signified by the squandering of money and energy, likely benefit dependency, crass attempts to attain status through showy excess, and a lack of respect for others. However, these illuminations are not intended to aestheticize neighbor­ hoods, competitively assert status, express artful intentions, or express “good taste.” Rather, they are temporarily installed communal decorations. In vilifying these light displays by way of expressing their contrasting aesthetic discernment, these acerbic appraisals misconceive the meanings and values that motivate their creation. These critical assessments exemplify how domestic styles of illumination have become swept up in the taste-­ making strategies entangled with intensified consumption and lifestyle promotion that are part of a broader reconfiguration of class identity.

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A second example focuses on how assertions about what constitutes “good taste” inform judgments about public illumination. Lighting design is becoming a critical component of place making, and professionally held ideas about what constitutes “tasteful” illumination are deployed in urban regeneration schemes. This is pertinent with regard to recent intentions to upgrade Blackpool Illuminations by adopting cultural strategies that pay little heed to locality or tradition, championing instead abstract qualities connected to “art” and “design” that emerge out of the particular “cosmopolitan” aesthetic tastes and professional practices of members of the “creative class” (Florida 2005). Certain forms of urban homogeneity result through the adoption of particular “designscapes,” depicted by Guy Julier (2005, 874) as a critical agglomeration of “brand design, architecture, urban planning, events and exhibitions” that articulate shared tastes, motivations, and connections to produce a form of “aesthetic consent.” For instance, the interiors of businesses in many cultural quarters have had cobalt blue illumination installed to connote a sophisticated atmosphere and a “cool” place image, a style that produces a certain visual sameness. In contrast to these globalized settings, Blackpool Illuminations express distinctive vernacular styles and local craft traditions that draw on British popular culture. As research has shown, most visitors are not drawn to the Illuminations in order to review their aesthetic or artistic qualities but to become immersed in the atmosphere that they coproduce (Edensor and Millington 2013). They do not seek sublime, provocative, or conceptual stimulation; instead, they enjoy qualities such as brightness, color, animation, nostalgia, prettiness, liveliness, and humor, along with the many symbolic references to popular culture. Despite their appeal to this well-­established constituency, factions and agents in the local authority have agitated for change, arguing that the Illuminations are outmoded and lack sophistication. Consequently, it is claimed, they need to be supplemented with more “artistic” lighting that will appeal to those likely to spend more money at the resort while helping transform the image of Blackpool. Accordingly, in 2008, a group in the Blackpool Illuminations department devised a “Festival of Light” intended to showcase the creations of subcontracted artists who did not belong to the design team located in the town. The program subsequently installed several lighting attractions that contrasted with “traditional” designs. Though these designs attracted a diverse range of opinions from visitors, some positive, others less so, they were absorbed into the vital throng of the Illuminations as a whole. Nevertheless, they represent an ongoing tension

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between those who mobilize cultural capital by advocating the installation of more “tasteful” and “artistic” light designs, and those who champion the unique qualities of traditional and locally based forms of creativity. Beverley Skeggs argues that the symbolic economy of class conflict continues to pervade everyday popular culture, and rather than being expressed in industrial struggles, such contestations resonate through realms of popu­ lar culture and consumption. Identities are thus continuously articulated as selves, and others are represented in “a system of inscription, exchange, perspective and value-­laden attribution” (Skeggs 2004, 9). The aesthetic judgments made about the Christmas light displays and Blackpool’s Illuminations resonate with these identity-­making processes and are characterized by anxious attempts to distinguish the self from the other. Distribution of the Sensible Ordinary Lighting The organization of lighting, including the most mundane street lighting, dazzling commercial signage, and pulsing advertisements, festive and fairground illumination and domestic lamps, have developed from multiple

Figure 16. Detail from Alice in Wonderland tableau, Blackpool, 2011. This “traditional” design is based on locally oriented style and popular culture rather than resulting from “artistic” intentions. Photograph by the author.

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decisions in which most people have had little say. These illuminations have been devised by designers, fabricated by skilled and unskilled labor, installed and maintained by electricians, produced by companies, advertised in trade magazines and on websites, sold by retailers and wholesalers, preferred by local authorities and commercial institutions, regulated by safety monitoring agencies, and standardized by professional bodies. All these agents participate in the making of particular decisions. Some are more influential than others, but all act to instantiate procedures, codes, and habits that bestow regularity on the world and foster the illusion that this is the way things are and should be. Emphatically, this does not mean that nothing changes, but that a host of agents—­concerned with lighting in this case—­ collectively endeavor to produce an equilibrium in which rules and regimes are contingently held in place for a while, producing commonsense understandings and apprehensions of space. This is part of what Henri Lefebvre (2002) terms the “quotidian.” The power to shape the world in this way is captured in Jacques Rancière’s conception of the distribution of the sensible. Rancière (2009, 13) claims that politics “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” This produces “the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision” (24). Accordingly, the political influences the production of the social by orchestrating spaces and times, forging a sensual, material realm that demarcates what is seen and unseen, smelled, heard, and touched. Rather than form an understanding of the world before we inhabit it, these affective and sensory relationships shape how we perform and apprehend space by inhabiting it. We become attuned to it by training our “senses, dispositions and expectations” to accord with its shape and become competent in “being able to initiate, imitate and elaborate skilled lines of action” (Anderson and Harrison 2010, 9). In landscapes, the elements that can potentially attract our attention are infinite. Accordingly, attention can be focused only on selective elements at any moment. The designers of urban environments attempt to focus attention toward particular aspects. By daylight, memorials, retail spaces, and iconic architecture are organized to draw attention away from multiple other features in the general visual array, although the eye may alight on many other aspects, from nearby textures and people to horizon and sky. At night, however, the potential to scan space and discern multiple elements

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in the landscape is diminished. Instead, selective illumination directs the gaze toward lit objects, profiled against a gloomy backdrop from which they stand out. Thus the design of space with artificial light produces landscapes in which “visual possibilities are shaped in advance” (Blumenberg 1993, 62). Illumination thereby guides action, sensation, and perception, producing “spatio-­temporal-­perceptual complexes that invite and encourage some attentional engagements and inhibit others, that shape our attentional performativity” (Hannah 2013, 242). It is therefore crucial to identify how power shapes what we attend to and ignore. Illumination contributes to already existing spaces that offer contexts for movement and inhabitation, soliciting certain maneuvers while deterring others. It activates “predisposed routines, emotions and movements,” generating the often unreflexive habitual practices and sensations that take place in familiar space (Adey 2007, 444). Urban lighting configures space according to distinct aesthetics, arrangements, luminosities, and colors that shape the meanings, practices, affects, and sensations of those who inhabit the nighttime city. We are guided down streets and paths chosen for us by those who have determined where illumination is situated, and how we feel is influenced by its spacing, intensity, and color. Legible, interesting, or homelike lighting may encourage us to enter particular areas, whereas spaces that are gloomy, glaring, or washed-­out appear uninviting. Artistic or enigmatic lights may lure us toward them to satisfy our curiosity, whereas others may warn us against approaching them or loom over us threateningly. The design of nightscapes thus engenders affective and sensory resonances that are part of the unreflexive inhabitation of place. The practices through which illumination is deployed to make space sensible is undergirded by professionally agreed standards that specify the luminosity and direction of streetlights, technical measures that bypass aesthetic considerations and spatial particularities. Rather, such standardized, quantitative solutions are concerned with maximizing visibility, offering security, and enhancing feelings of safety, and tend to produce over­ illuminated, homogeneous lightscapes (Major 2015). This is exemplified by the German guidelines for traffic safety that follow industrial norms circumscribed by the photometric characteristics of streetlights. These guidelines recommend standards of brightness, uniformity, and glare but do not mention energy efficiency, color, or design. However, as Katharina Krause (2015) shows, these conventions are becoming outdated, with emergent criteria for regulations reconfiguring the deployment of light. Narrow conventions also inhere in advice dispensed about “appropri-

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ate” lighting in the British state-­sponsored document Manual for Streets that provides authoritative guidance about street design (UK Department for Transport 2007). The document was collectively produced by the Department for Transport, the  Department for Communities and Local Government, and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), as well as selective private consultants. Key priorities focus on how illumination should maximize a sense of security, refrain from excess, distinguish between main and subsidiary streets, and avoid contributing to street clutter. In advising on qualities of intensity, height, scale, and color, the document fails to acknowledge how innovative and unusual lighting might have a place in street design. In focusing almost exclusively on measurement and function, lighting is presented as a technical matter subject to the expertise offered by engineers and electricians. The homogeneous street lighting that has emerged out of such standardizing processes contrasts with the far more diverse streetlights of the 1950s that combined functional with aesthetic qualities (The Quadhurst Project n.d.). In extending particular specifications across space, such regulatory programs shape modes of sensing and paying attention. Yet in the UK, since local authorities have considerable autonomy over the organization of street lighting, many new models may result in a context in which energy reduction and financial expenditure are emergent contemporary imperatives. Moreover, since LEDs and more responsive forms of illumination are increasingly adopted, the sensible will potentially be redistributed in more variegated ways (Shaw 2014b). The inequalities inscribed in the illuminated landscape discussed above are an integral part of the normative staging of nocturnal space, part of the distribution of the sensible through lighting. So too is the distinctive distribution of the capitalist landscape, overtly devised to attract attention (Hannah 2013). Jonathan Crary (1999) argues that the modes of distraction that so frequently configure us as individual consumers inculcate a habitual disposition to switch attention rapidly from one thing to another. This perceptual adaptability, necessitated by the acceleration of commodi­fication, is also mobilized in the encounter with the urban commercial landscape after dark, when flashing advertisements, logos, and illuminated spectacles solicit both attentiveness and distraction. A particularly intensified switching may occur in hypercommercial sites such as Times Square, where focus on any one of the animated signs or screens is difficult. Such shifts in attention are similarly solicited at other sites. Anne Cronin (2006) discusses how advertisements are typically situated at busy

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urban intersections where traffic temporarily slows or stops, exploiting the rhythms with which people are aligned as they move across the city. Here, the motorist shifts concentration from driving to the glaring hoarding or screen, an experience intensified at night. Illumination is also used to draw in consumers to shopping malls. In the ION Orchard Shopping Mall in Singapore, besides the deployment of “ambiance fragrancing,” lighting is integral to the design of an entrance that takes the form of a huge glass cocoon. This passage from street to mall engulfs pedestrians in the radiance emitted by LED walls programmed to produce ever-­changing colors and is followed by the play of light generated by media screens and reflective materials inside (Hudson 2015). Such diverse applications of light, along with smooth surfaces, piped music, and air conditioning, constitute “relatively unfocused inducements to shop,” producing comfortable, mildly stimulating sensory and affective environments to which shoppers become attuned (Healy 2014, 35). Powerful commercial and bureaucratic strategies through which the sensible is (re)distributed invariably delimit the potential for more creative, random, critical, and improvisational experiences. Yet the stability of illuminated environments is always threatened by the dynamic change that capitalism heralds, whether through economic crisis or innovations, and by failings of maintenance and repair, which if not persistently undertaken lead to shabby appearances. Besides being susceptible to change and inefficient application, these powerful strategies are supplemented by other forms of illumination that challenge their sensory imperialism, such as the artistic works discussed in the previous chapter. In addition, contemporary developments are challenging the reinscription of standardized measurements and unhindered commercial practices. Emergent technologies and a growing concern with ecological considerations, excessive light pollution, local diversity, and innovative aesthetics are stimulating a reconfiguring of the sensible through illumination. The Christmas light displays that transform neighborhoods also exemplify a compelling challenge to the usual appearance of the nocturnal urban landscape, interrupting expectations and professional designs by imprinting a usually invisible identity through illumination. Besides such vernacu­ lar intrusions on the nightscape, light designers can unsettle habitu­ated apprehension through tactical guerrilla lighting that challenges bland, technocratic illumination by using portable lumieres to temporarily transform ordinary appearances. This is not simply an alternative professional practice, however, for importance is placed on involving communities in

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addressing their lighting desires and needs, to “rediscover, question and act within their environment” by turning urban spaces into “a laboratory for social engagement and aesthetic expression” (Light Collective 2015, 179). Residents are invited to experimentally coproduce illuminated designs as an alternative to professional imposition while broadening debates about public lighting. Such projects are not merely pragmatic but produce affective and sensory impacts that “provoke, intervene, and disrupt the established regime of the sensible” (Berberich, Campbell, and Hudson 2013, 318). Urban Screens and Projections Complex Contestations In this final section, I consider how questions about power and the distribution of the sensible resonate through diverse contemporary perspectives that account for the increasingly widespread use of urban screens, distinctively new elements in the city’s lightscape. Urban screens are propagating across cities, taking forms that range from advertisements, augmented facades, information displays, live screening, and stage backdrops to “experimental digital architecture” (Slaatta 2006). Abigail Susik takes a pessimistic line in exploring how technological innovations in projector design and digital culture have enabled the projection of high-­definition moving images onto three-­dimensional surfaces. Susik argues that extending the power of commercial interests to saturate the city with images threatens our ability to distinguish between actual and virtual space. This could result in, she argues, a thoroughly mediatized architecture that clothes the materiality of the city in images and messages from multiple angles and planes, and exacerbates light pollution. This will render the city illegible under a blizzard of mirages in which “all surfaces and images become superficially equivalent, and the ghostly ‘projection’ may entirely conceal the identity and integrity of the object, site, or being” (Susik 2012, 112). Electronic screens do not form part of a building’s memory in the way that frescoes or stained glass windows do; rather, their restless, constantly changing imagery contributes to a dematerialization of architecture and to continuous ephemerality. It does seem possible that such techniques will be appropriated in corporate advertising campaigns, as is already the case in settings such as Times Square. In the future, this may become allied to the kinds of smart advertising strategies that identify and address passing individuals via facial recognition, targeting them with tailored commercial messages and digital advertisements based on their consumer profile, as featured  in Minority

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Report, the Hollywood science fiction movie that conjures up a surveillance-­ saturated dystopia. Scott McQuire (2006) suggests that the experience of the media city has already resulted in an environment that is consumed in distraction and increasingly experienced as shifting, variable, and contingent. Such mediatized realms, he contends, are configured by the multiple networks to which individuals are connected that interpene­trate the city, eroding the potential for public space to serve as a venue for common experience and social engagement. Though an expansion of the commercial utility of urban screens undoubtedly raises the possibility of the kind of urban saturation these authors suggest, their analysis also chimes with repeated concerns about successive illuminated advertising landscapes throughout the twentieth century. It also construes a somewhat passive recipient, subsumed by the power of the screen and helpless to avoid uncritically consuming images. These somewhat pessimistic views about the future outcomes of the convergence of buildings and media technology contrast with other understandings that foreground the potential for innovation and creativity (Slaatta 2006; Soltani 2011; Rofe and Stein 2011). These accounts celebrate the potentially radical modification of urban morphology and the reconfiguration of the city as a digital landscape. The prospects of ephemerality and instability that concern critics are conversely conceptualized as offering abundant promise for creativity and dynamism. For these writers, screen technology offers new ways to consider the facades, walls, and surfaces of buildings, as well as other features that can be subject to visual manipulation. In combination with materials such as glass and plastic, buildings may become variable, transitory objects, subject to ever-­changing aesthetic and informational effects. Such designs could foreground other qualities: color, radiance, translucence, and the transmission of ideas and knowledge that diverge from usual modes of sense making. The dynamic, mediatized city would not be habitually apprehended but rather attract attention to fluid aesthetic and sensory qualities, effects that would be amplified at night. The phantasmagorical impact of the early modern city could thereby be restored to urban experience. Furthermore, ways to apprehend and appreciate form, materiality, history, and function could solicit awareness of architectural qualities while also drawing out multisensual attributes. Amir Soltani (2011, 75) contends that such developments may offer an opportunity for designers, artists, and architects to “freely cross synthesize, explore, deconstruct and let their imaginations flow.” Exemplifying the potential of this digital technology, the Rundle Lantern is a large media screen wrapped around a building on which computer-­

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Figure 17. Giant urban screen, Fremont Street Experience, Las Vegas, 2011. Is this an empty, commodified spectacle or transformative, entertaining attraction? Photograph by the author.

controlled LEDs project images. Its installation at a busy central interchange in Adelaide, Matthew Rofe and Luke Stein (2011) maintain, has reconfigured the spatial relations of the city. The striking, original designs and artworks that play across its surface act as translocal conduits, globally transmitting local identity and receiving images and ideas from global

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media flows, promoting a city with a rather staid reputation as cosmopolitan, culturally and technologically innovative. The enthusiastic responses to the possibilities that media screens promise can appear unduly optimistic; perhaps Zlatan Krajina provides a more measured account. His ethnographic study focuses on how urban screens are highly noticeable when first installed, but later simply blend into the habitual apprehension of the city, becoming a somewhat inconspicuous element in the lightscape (Krajina 2014). Inhabitants “domesticate” such features while carrying out their everyday routines and incorporate them into their familiar experiences. They thus become features glimpsed while moving or that briefly distract passersby, and while at first they may enchant or disorient the experience of place, they come to provide points of orientation or tincture surroundings with their light. This is not to argue that their effects vanish over time, for media screens that feature art or advertising regularly change their content. Nevertheless, Krajina asserts that along with the broader effects of contemporary media, as agents of transmission they conjure up other places in an already connected, globalized world. As such, they form part of the “quotidian sceneographies” of everyday urban life (8). There is no doubt that the installation of certain media screens signifies strategies through which powerful interests shape the distribution of the sensible in urban space. Yet Krajina’s analysis is based on neither speculative assertions about consumer passivity nor culturally populist assumptions about the liberating qualities of consumption. Through his multisited ethnography, he demonstrates that people engage with screens in various ways and, above all, accommodate them within their everyday lives, refuting hyperbolic claims about both their potentially dystopian and liberating effects. Conclusion The brief discussion about media screens suggests that the relationship between light and power is dynamic and subject to contrasting and contesting interpretations. I have demonstrated that power is multistranded and inflects the deployment of light in many ways. Illumination has an overtly functional use in strategic techniques that aim to control and monitor bodies in space. It inscribes the unequal distribution of economic and social power with unerring clarity, revealing through its glare the gilded realms of the wealthy, iconic memorials, the might of the state, and the ubiquitous urban dissemination of commerce; a lack of light or poor quality illumination often signifying the domains of the subjugated. Lighting championed

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as stylish or beautiful is used in the acquisition of cultural capital, serving as a palpable positional good in situations where it is scarce—­and in a future in which ecologically beneficial lighting will become preeminent, the possession of sustainable designs may heighten distinctions between rich and poor (Hirsch 1977). Where illumination is deemed to lack aesthetic value, it can be subject to symbolic violence. Less obviously, normative lighting arrangements, through which the sensible is distributed, testify to a dispersed, mundane form of power through which meanings and sensations become unreflexive manifestations of common sense. In all these cases, however, illumination possesses no essential meaning but becomes layered with contested interpretations, evaluations, and uses. We might anticipate that as social life becomes suffused with increasingly varied commercial, leisure, and working rhythms, lighting infrastructures will respond to this diversity. Moreover, the intensification of specialist market segmentation and proliferating identities is also likely to generate a diversity of lighting forms that will decenter any authoritative deployments, values, and tastes.

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Chapter 5

Festivals of Illumination: Painting and Playing with Light

Enchanting Illumination In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs bedazzled subjects with lavish, baroque displays of fireworks and theatrical illuminations, demonstrating their majesty and challenging religious power. Though infrequent, such events transformed the overwhelming darkness that pervaded these times, magnifying the power of the royal personage with light (Koslofsky 2011). Later and ironically, as Alice Barnaby (2015) outlines, light was frequently part of the symbolic repertoire of vio­ lent political protests and demonstrations in eighteenth-­century cities. In nineteenth-­century London, however, it once more became a source of perceptual delight in pleasure gardens and with the deployment of transparencies to illuminate building facades during public commemorations. In nineteenth-­century Paris, fantastically lit theatrical stages and opulent foyers were subsequently transmuted into the lavishly illuminated spaces of the city’s commercial areas (Bressani 2015). These developments underpin Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s (1988) assertion that while early illumination regulated efficient movement, consumption, and policing, the late nineteenth century saw a broad shift from a lighting of order to a lighting of festivity.  Gernot Böhme (2010, 29) contends that the development of lighting is coterminous with the broader modern colonization of aesthetic experience into ever more spaces. The advent of “new perceptual pleasures” was accompanied by “the technical mastery of light and sound, together with the technical shaping of . . . materiality.” Along with telephony, film, and photography, electric light has added to what Jo Collins and John Jervis (2008, 1) term the phantasmagorical city, replete with “the shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and insubstantial,” producing defamiliarization, uncertainty, and fascination, constitutive aspects of modern experience. 109

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These phantasmagorical attributes were extravagantly epitomized at world trade fairs and theme parks. At New York’s Coney Island, Gary Cross (2006, 365) describes how “Luna Park and Dreamland created a dazzling architectural fantasy of towers, domes and minarets, outlined by electric lights, giving these strange oriental shapes an even more mysterious and magical air at night.” The extensive deployment of light to produce fantasy and pleasure is exemplified by Scott McQuire’s (2008, 118) claim that at the end of the nineteenth century, “the Chicago fairgrounds . . . contained more light than any contemporary city in the United States.” At Blackpool Illuminations, a profound theatricalization of space continues to invest space with oneiric, otherworldly qualities. In this chapter, though, I exemplify how the current use of illumination for pleasure and fantasy is most profoundly expressed by the inexorable rise of light festivals. These proliferating events demonstrate how the deployment of sophisticated technologies and ingenious creative approaches heralds the advent of an era in which light enchants space, reconfigures sensation, and deepens a sense of place in novel ways. Contemporary light festivals vary in scale, duration, purpose, and form. At the largest scale, Lyon’s Fête des Lumières, held annually over four nights in early December, offers a complex panoply of displays, performances, and projections that attract four million visitors. The festival uses computer-­ generated projections tailored to specific buildings, light sculptures, and an array of other techniques as part of a highly sophisticated program that extends across the city. Sydney’s two-­week VIVID festival is also large, equally driven by innovative artistic design and technology, and other extensive festivals are found in Prague, Montreal, Kobe, Singapore, and Berlin. Smaller events take place in Durham, York, Eindhoven, Ghent, and Helsinki, among other locations. These art-­and design-­led events contrast with traditional and religious festivals that include the Chinese Lantern Festival, the Burmese Thadingyut Festival that marks the end of a period of abstinence, and the Thai Loi Krathong that incorporates processions, illuminated floating tributes, and the release of lanterns into the night sky. In addition, an explosion of more recent community-­based lantern parades has emerged, encouraging practices of vernacular cultural creativity. There are also events that are less easy to categorize, including Scotland’s Enchanted Forest, which takes place in a rural setting. Neoliberal Spectacles Light festivals are inextricably entangled with neoliberal politics and economics. The discussion harks back to the focus on media screens, a key

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element in much festive provision. I subsequently refute these critiques by focusing on the progressive potentialities of much festive illumination. Festivalization has been conceived as a common instrument in promoting the “crea­tive city,” whereby creativity has become a key notion wielded to valorize neoliberal forms of capitalist regeneration, deployed to summon up a “crea­tive class,” the “creative industries,” or “creative cities” (Florida 2005). In culture-­led regeneration strategies, heritage, art, and leisure become “experiences” to be consumed in “tourist resort areas, theme parks, redeveloped water-­fronts, trade expositions, mega-­events, shopping complexes, festival markets, art shows and galleries, opera halls and museums” (Gotham 2005, 227). As cities vie for inward investment, these place-­ enhancing, culture-­led strategies offer evidence of a “vibrant” location that will attract tourists, shoppers, investors, and potential middle-­class residents (Picard and Robinson 2006). Since the 1980s, there has been a huge rise in the number of urban arts festivals that increasingly serve to invigorate urban economies as “a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-­making” (Quinn 2010, 266). Doreen Jakob points out that cities once organized large festivals to advance their reputation, but now they foster a much more extensive process of “eventification,” which has “infiltrated urban and economic development on a much smaller scale.” She defines such events as the “deliberate organization of a heightened emotional and aesthetic experience at a designated time and space” (Jakob 2012, 448). As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore assert, places must stage experiences to add value to their economy, producing urban space “as a spectacle and transformed into an aestheticized place of consumption” (quoted in Jakob 2012, 449). Joel McKim (2012, 130–­31) exemplifies such strategies by referring to Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles, which he describes as “a kind of public showroom for the city’s expanding multimedia sector, while simultaneously promoting an image of Montreal as the type of technologically developed, creative, and design-­intensive urban centre that is deemed attractive to foreign investment.” More widely, the development of the nighttime economy has expanded times and places of commerce and commodification. In the UK, Graeme Evans (2012, 36) estimates that nighttime activities “contributed £66 billion to the UK economy in 2009, employing 1.3 million people.” Accordingly, culture-­led regeneration strategies can provide real benefits, including more diverse leisure provision, more job creation, more  tourists and investment, and more lively nocturnal atmospheres. These positive outcomes are emphasized by Salim Jiwa et al.  (2009), in the case of

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Nuit Blanche events in European and American cities, during which usually closed facilities open, live entertainment is staged, and light displays are installed in urban centers that otherwise subside into inactivity after nightfall. While such events appear to draw diverse people together and generate economic benefits, Kevin Fox Gotham (2005, 226) is more critical, arguing that such cultural redevelopments are akin to a “carnival mask” that covers continuing disinvestment and increasing social inequality, and moreover, incessantly recycles “familiar themes for passive consumers.” Rather than prioritizing the enhancement of life for residents, he regards these strate­ gies as instrumental, neoliberal, competitive endeavors geared to Darwinian interurban competition and the expanding gentrification of urban space that privilege only certain classes. These competitive imperatives, according to Bernadette Quinn (2010, 266), produce tensions between creative and economic objectives, as artists are obliged to produce works that attract large crowds, seeking common denominators that satisfy key economic stakeholders. Indeed, McKim (2012, 130) contends that the task of animating public spaces increasingly devolves to designers, and he asks: Does the required skill set of the public artist now include such attributes as the ability to remain highly attuned to client branding initiatives, the willingness to compromise and adjust to variable circumstances, and the capacity to generate maximum impact while ideally remaining free of controversy?

Quentin Stevens and Hae Ran Shin (2014) similarly acknowledge that many large urban festivals are highly organized, tightly scripted, and dominated by large, spectacular events instrumentally staged for political and economic gain. Thus, what may emerge are events replete with aesthetic conventions circulated by the aforementioned international “creative class” and particular urban “designscapes” typified by Guy Julier (2005, 874) as a collection of “brand design, architecture, urban planning, events and exhibitions.” Emerging out of international urban networks, such schemes impose generic designs on places that resonate with the shared tastes of members of the creative class. Gotham (2005, 234) similarly contends that “whereas the appeal of local celebrations is the opportunity to see something different, celebrations that are redesigned to attract tourists seem more and more alike.” Such critiques infer that generic spectacles eventuate, as “cultural substance becomes replaced with cultural spectacle,” and “increasing homogeneity and declining creativity” result, as “cultural

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strategies fail to connect with the specificities of the places within which they are located” (Quinn 2010, 271–­72). These arguments chime with those that insist that we now live in a “society of the spectacle” in which spectators passively behold seductive, extravagant displays organized by capital and the state that have replaced “authentic” life (Debord 1994). Characterized as a new stage in the development of capitalism, the society of the spectacle shifts from manufacturing commodities to producing images, and is dominated by advertising, mass media, and other culture industries while stimulating consumer desires. As social relations become increasingly mediated by commodified images, estrangement becomes pervasive (Ward 2001). Such spectacles bedazzle the public, limiting individuals’ ability to perceive the “real” conditions that underlie their enslavement as workers and consumers. Distracted by fantasies that pacify and seduce, spectators’ scope for critical thought is diminished. For Gotham (2005, 242), spectacular festivals are largely informed by “hegemonic ideologies . . . promotional rhetoric, corporate advertising” that attempt to transform urban space “into an aesthetic product symbolizing consumption, leisure and entertainment.” Consumers confront and experience such spectacles as external forces that constitute them as “atomized consumers rather than as collective and creative beings” (235). Moreover, unlike medieval festivals and carnivals at which an intense immersion produced an overwhelming, immanent experience, contemporary festivals are time-­tabled to fit into work and consumption schedules. Though they gesture toward a shared public space, this realm has been privatized, commercialized, and subject to surveillance. Encapsulating such contentions with specific regard to light festivals, Heather Diack (2012, 11) draws on the Nuit Blanche events. She describes them as dominated by “an extravaganza of electronic and digital media” that generates a spectacle so powerful that it pulls those who experience it “towards machine-­like states of attention, objectification, and endurance.” This feeds what she calls the “attention economy,” as creative leisure is supplanted by distraction and absorption in spectacle. These critiques undoubtedly offer plausible arguments about the commercialism, spectacularity, placelessness, compromised creativity, and generic design of festivals, including light festivals. The intensified commercialization and regulation of festivals can diminish communal expressions, as with the English celebration of Bonfire Night, which has become a series of “ticketed and seated charitable events as a way to control the

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crowds” (Dalmasso 2013, 80). An absorbing, convivial, neighborly event has been transformed into a paid spectacle, replacing the shared staging of bonfires and fireworks in corners, back gardens, and waste ground. Other festivals similarly resemble somewhat empty spectacles. For instance, the New Year firework display of 2015 that cascaded from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s highest building, while astonishing in scale and effect, seemed to incarnate pure, excessive spectacularity. So too, perhaps, does Hong Kong’s Symphony of Lights (Petty 2015). But even such illuminated spectacles offer sensual effects and generate pulsating illuminated atmospheres, constituting a basis for shared enjoyment and conviviality. Moreover, although such productions resonate with intensified commodification, proliferating eventification, and the theming of urban space (Gottdiener 1997; Hannigan 1998), notions of passive spectatorship construe automatons, denying the creativity and reflexivity of an active audience (Barker 1999). The capacity of onlookers to interpret what they see in numerous ways, irrespective of the meanings encoded into the forms on which they gaze, is denied (Hall 2001). Despite critiquing the commercial tendencies of festivals, Gotham considers it inapposite to construe audiences as subject to “a condition of quiescence, atomisation, stupefaction and conformity.” As he adds, urban festivals may be “discursive fields of contestation and struggle” that can “express power relations” and can “generate antagonistic mobilisations to challenge the urban status quo” (Gotham 2011, 201). Festivals have the potential to offer alternative, critical, and creative locally oriented responses that militate against homogeneous and dominant outcomes. Moreover, light festivals are not only organized by those promoting a crea­ tive city agenda but also emerge from bottom-­up, community-­led initiatives that involve local organizational skills and vernacular creativity. The negative, pessimistic arguments outlined above carry some force but provide a one-­sided understanding of festivals in general, and light festivals in particular. In developing a sustained analysis of the rich potentialities that light festivals offer, I now focus on how various installations, projections, and modes of festive lighting can promote productive encounters. Accordingly, I identify four key processes, drawing on participant observation and interpretation of installations. First, I discuss how in various ways, festive light installations can thoroughly defamiliarize the spaces to which we are socially, sensually, and perceptually accustomed. In chapter 3 I focused on how particular light applications enhanced a sense of place; the second theme expands this exploration of place-­making capaci­

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ties, investigating how festive illumination represents historical and cultural dimensions, and deepens a sense of belonging. Third, I look at how lighting techniques invite various forms of interactivity that transform the usual engagement with place and repudiate suspicions of spectator passivity. Finally, I examine how festivals bring together constellations of artistic creativity, technical expertise, and public design, offering opportunities to experiment, test potentially useful technologies, and share ideas and skills. Defamiliarization The routine practices of inhabitants, businesses, government, workers, students, and visitors characteristically undergird normative understandings about the meaning and function of familiar places, and in this repe­ tition, the sensing of the everyday world is also made familiar, becoming ingrained in bodies. Festivals tend to be short, but they break up these normative quotidian rhythms. In marking out a temporary departure from these routines, festivals constitute a period during which ordinary conventions and social interactions may be suspended and participants allowed greater license for expressive, creative, and improvisational behavior (Edensor 2010). Most current festivals cannot be compared to the medieval carnivals during which ordinary hierarchies were overturned in liminal time and space, the sacred could be profaned, and corporeal excess and the grotesque were celebrated, although the carnival’s function was regarded as an essential safety valve that reinforced the social order (Bakhtin 1984). Contemporary festivals offer a more provisional relaxation of everyday expectations and may be characterized as “liminoid,” pertaining to liminality. There is somewhat of an overturning of the usual order of things, but excessively expressive physical and social behavior would be deemed out of place, as would any attempt to temporarily overthrow the powerful. Because festivals are ephemeral events that do not colonize space, are on the move, or only linger awhile, they are unlikely to change the enduring meanings and uses of space. However, in temporarily challenging, augmenting, or revealing overlooked qualities, festivals do offer opportunities for practicing, representing, and apprehending place in ways at variance to habitual experience. Light possesses a particularly rich capacity to defamiliarize familiar places, transforming what is well known into an uncanny realm and thereby suggesting that place may be apprehended otherwise. This can potentially produce a reflexive critique toward conservative attempts to inscribe place with an essential identity while revealing the partiality and specificity of human modes of perception.

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I have already discussed how buildings act as screens on which digitally mapped images are projected. Digital mapping techniques allow software to “map out points of interface with the spatial coordinates of the existing structure,” using specific architectural features—­windows, niches, cornices, columns, and arches (Susik 2012, 115). Site-­specific projections can alter the usual apprehension of the building, transforming color and animating textures and forms with novel resonances. Often, effects are deployed to dematerialize buildings or create illusions that their materiality has changed. This is illustrated by a large projection staged in the capacious Place des Terreaux that serves as a key venue during Lyon’s Fête des Lumières. The display, Jouons avec les temps (Playing with time), devised by the designer Marie-­Jeanne Gauthé, lasted nearly ten minutes and covered the buildings on two sides of the imposing square, accompanied by a powerful soundtrack. As the image of a clock ticked relentlessly on one side of the square and a metronome moved back and forth on the other, the buildings were subjected to a plethora of weather effects that ceaselessly mutated their surfaces. At first, snow swirled across the facades, then froze the building, shards cracked away from the facades, and the whole structure appeared to shatter as a blizzard whirled across. The icescape then devolved into a water-­filled scene with bubbles and blocks of ice coursing upward where they solidified into icicles. Forks of lightning followed an intermittent passage where silhouetted figures cavorted across the facade, and then waves of heat assailed the building, causing it to buckle, becoming fluid in form, at which point it melted, as if made of soft wax. Then the apparently melted structure reassembled as pieces of ash cascaded upward, successively slotting into place. Next came pouring rain, as figures with umbrellas floated down and a rainbow briefly emerged, spreading its vibrant hues across the surface. The rain nurtured plants that grew luxuriantly upward, twining around the structure and bursting into flower. After assuming a melted appearance once more, the building rose into being. All went dark before the vertical and horizontal lineaments of the buildings were etched out with white lines and yet another change transformed the facades into collections of puddles into which raindrops created ripples that circled outward before evaporating. A final, somewhat dystopian passage saw the clock fall and time become suspended or finished, as uncanny eddies played across the facade during the end times, a catastrophe caused by global warming. Other digital mapping displays make buildings appear to crumble, float, burn, become transparent, and evaporate, or simply serve as the surface for the abstract play of color, light, and manifold shapes. In blurring the

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Figure 18. Melting building, sequence in the projection, Jouons avec les temps, Place des Terreaux, Fête des Lumières, Lyon, 2010. This example shows how digital mapping can defamiliarize buildings through transforming perception about their solidity and material constitution. Photograph by the author.

real and virtual in these phantasmal configurations, such multiple, shifting effects can disrupt the usual cognitive understanding and sensual apprehension of a familiar building, besides revealing more acutely its compositional form and infrastructure. Here, the playful representation of the action of weather on a material structure over time offers a serious reve­ lation: that the material world is continuously being altered by the agencies that assail it from within and without. Though such transformations occur much more slowly in the real world, wind, moisture, ice, and sun, along with the work of plants and animals, continually undermine the illusory solidity that buildings manifest (Edensor 2011). Besides its compelling force, the display has a serious thrust, namely, that the precariousness of all material things is especially threatened by global warming. A somewhat different case of defamiliarization, from Durham’s 2013 biannual Lumiere festival, concerned a red public telephone box of traditional, iconic design, placed in the city’s Market Square. The phone box was transformed into a glowing aquarium, its interior lit from within to

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produce a brilliant blue scene of live fishes and green plants in the evening murk. These vivid colors were accentuated by its setting, the creators Benedetto Bufalino and Benoit Deseille juxtaposing the cold, gray November setting of the square with allusions of faraway places and summer travel. In taking a familiar feature of quotidian British life and converting it into an aquarium, the designers produced a surrealistic experience but also suggested that these almost obsolete elements of the urban fabric might have alternative uses. In an era when most people communicate via mobile phone, such outmoded fixtures could provide welcome enhancements in public space. Indeed, visitors commented that after seeing the work, they found it difficult to look at a phone box without recalling this sight. A different way of using everyday objects to dislocate perceptions and expectations is to reproduce them at very different scales. Since 2010, a giant string of thirty-­one vintage Christmas lights  fitted with LEDs, devised by PRG Scenic, has been installed during the festive season in front of the McGraw Hill Building on Sixth Avenue in New York. Together with the equally giant baubles that lie alongside, these striking lights recall the gigantic modernist sculptures of Claes Oldenburg that offer a wry critique of consumerism and commodity fetishism. Besides making a festive link to the everyday homes in which the usual-­sized versions of such lights are displayed, the fixtures draw attention to their usually overlooked form and the quality of the radiance they dispense. They animate the busy sidewalk in the heart of midtown and constitute a temporary gathering place for locals and tourists. Installations such as this and Aquarium literally constitute what Walter Benjamin (1997, 173) calls “profane illuminations,” through which “a person perceives the most ordinary, overlooked objects of everyday reality . . . as uncanny, supernatural, and irrational.” Other forms of inventive defamiliarization critically reveal the normative workings of power and unreflexive, commonsense practices. Johanne Sloan (2015) describes Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky’s All Night Convenience, a work installed in a Toronto shop in September 2012, and a one-­off event in which the artists constructed and hand-­assembled two thousand individual “commodities” with LED lights inserted into their interiors. These illuminated, hollowed-­out products not only lacked the weight and feel of actual commodities and hence disrupted sensory expectations; they also undermined their appearance as commodities because they were free to take away as a curious form of lantern. These examples are all concerned with the defamiliarization of urban settings, yet illumination can also be deployed in rural environments to

Figure 19. Benedetto Bufalino and Benoit Deseille’s Telephone Box Aquarium defamiliarizes a city square and suggests alternative uses for almost obsolete elements of the urban fabric. Durham Lumiere, 2013. Reproduced courtesy of Benedetto Bufalino.

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Figure 20. Giant vintage Christmas lights, designed by PRG Scenic, McGraw Hill Building, Sixth Avenue, New York City, 2014. Common lighting forms are defamiliarized through enlargement. Photograph by the author.

deliver a profoundly unusual encounter with the countryside. The three-­ week-­long Enchanted Forest takes place at Faskally Wood near Pitlochry in Perthshire, Scotland, in autumn. Initiated in 2002, it annually attracts around thirty thousand visitors, who follow a trail through the wood. The festival is staged in a mixed woodland in which the usual sensual and sym-

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bolic apprehension of the forest is made strange by lighting techniques and choreographed sound, confounding previous sensory encounters with woodland. The disorienting capacities of illumination to transform the apprehension of place are thus particularly apparent at the Enchanted Forest. The event radically challenges normative romantic values associated with rural landscapes and forests, as well as with the usual encounters with rurality after nightfall, where gloom generally impedes any movement through space, and when people do move, they use torchlight. Indeed, few people are drawn to the darkened moor, valley, or forest after the sun has set, and long-­pervasive mythic associations of lurking danger and supernatural encounter testify to residual fears of darkness. Consequently, an encounter with illuminated nature is deeply unfamiliar, for the rural is often conceived as a realm in which tradition persists and in which modernity—­and modern illumination—­has only partially intruded. In rural settings at night, colors are indistinguishable, as everything merges into a gray and subsequently black accumulation. Here, though, lighting transforms what is by day a forest scene composed of multiple shades and hues of green and brown into a multicolored panoply, making a strange scene for both those accustomed to woodland in daylight and those habituated to the nocturnal forest. Lights flicker high in trees, act as a brilliantly colored backdrop to darker silhouettes, vividly illuminate particu­lar trees, take the form of fabulous beasts, reveal steps and paths, or light up fountains that gush out of the loch in the woods, all effects that render the experience of woodland peculiar. Music and other recorded sounds waft through the arboreal space, supplementing the air of unreality. Modes of looking in dark space are conditioned by a greater scrutiny to what lies around and ahead, unlike the scanning of the landscape that is mobilized by day, where the eye roams across space and can easily chart the way ahead. At night, by contrast, the eye is drawn to patches or points of light that punctuate the darkness. Where darkness makes progress difficult, a torch is generally used, and its beam produces a linear stream of light that might illumine the path ahead and adjacent elements, but all that lies on either side is shrouded in gloom. However, in the Enchanted Forest, colored lights stage a theatrical vista composed of unfolding layers. This is not a scene that could be apprehended by day, and it provides a depth that contrasts greatly with the usual perception of a rural landscape at night, which takes the form of a dark gathering of indistinguishable mass. Even more startlingly, the lighting techniques in the forest separate particular trees from their companions, exploiting the rural darkness. By day, the wood appears as a dense accumulation of leaves and shrubbery, where

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Figure 21. Illuminated tree, Enchanted Forest, Perthshire, Scotland, 2012. The tree, tinted with an unfamiliar hue, stands out from the dark background against which its form is strikingly revealed. Photograph by the author.

each tree melds into the other in a collective effusion, often making it difficult to discern the individuality of one tree or bush from another. Strikingly, through focused illumination in the Enchanted Forest, the architecture of a tree can be grasped in a way it could not in daylight. Here, the

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shapely uniqueness of any one oak, beech, or birch tree can be illuminated against a dark backdrop, simultaneously defamiliarizing woodland and more acutely revealing its individual living constituents. The capacity of illumination to separate a form from its surroundings offers an alternative mode of perceiving, allowing a visual focus on form and texture that fosters appreciation of the separate constituents of the world. Finally, defamiliarization through illumination can be especially effective when it causes viewers to question the efficacy of their own senses, to reflect on what exactly it is that they are seeing. One of the most arresting installations at Sydney’s 2014 VIVID festival was Galaxia III, an ever-­changing rectangle full of shifting geometric patterns of light that produced a riot of optical effects. The work was situated in an unprepossessing shop front in the Circular Harbour, but charged this mundane space with kinetic energy. Created by Alan Rose (Alan Rose Art), Galaxia III resonates with the op art of the 1960s and 1970s, created by artists less concerned with producing representations of landscapes, still lives, or figures than with focusing on ideas and the relationship of a piece to the viewer. Moreover, like Carlos Cruz-­Diez’s Chromosaturation, their works were not devised to convey the artist’s emotions but aimed to investigate the perceptual and mental responses of the viewer. Simon Rycroft (2005, 355) contends that the work was “a generator of perceptual responses, possessing a dynamic quality which provoked illusory images and sensations in the spectator,” thereby focusing attention on the specific capacities of human vision and bringing into doubt the veracity and accuracy of what is seen. The confusing visual sensations produced by gazing on a static work by Bridget Riley and seeing the illusory appearance of its movement are amplified and intensified by Rose’s adoption of light to further explore optical effects. The two colors that make up the 924 individual squares of the rectangular checkerboard pattern of Galaxia III actually do perpetually change, a dynamic process of color transformations and radiant luminosity that produces an endless riot of illusions, distortions, and mirages. Rose emphasizes that a key aim of such works “is to induce a mental state—­where the viewer goes from there is up to the individual imagination.” He contends that with Galaxia III, “there has to be some confusion  .  .  . the opposing colours change so slowly that the viewer can’t quite remember what it looked like ten seconds ago.” Rose develops this theme: the slowly changing colours and varying block shapes produce kinetic effects which are designed to induce transformative mind states. The works give the initial illusion of random forms, but with the passing of time the ­completely

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ordered geometry is perceived. In this way they are situated between order and chaos, and hopefully compel the viewer to contemplate them for an extended period, maybe conjuring up personal narratives.

In confronting this work, we question whether what we are seeing is accurate or whether our eyes are playing tricks on us. This makes us wonder further about how we see with light. Do others perceive this work as we do? As discussed in chapter 1, we perceive the world through culturally located modes of sensory experience and conceptualization, according to norms that prescribe what is sensually desirable and acceptable; thus “we not only think about our senses, we think through them” (Classen 1993, 9). The defamiliarization staged through the application of light can solicit alternative ways in which it might be engaged with sensorially, thus critically challenging how the sensible is distributed in constituting a commonsense realm of perception. Accordingly, light festivals have the potential to engender what Jane Bennett (2001, 5) calls “re-­enchantment,” offering encounters that render one “transfixed, spellbound,” not merely through being charmed and delighted but through experiencing the more uncanny sensation of “being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-­psychic-­intellectual disposition.” Inventive festive illumination converts local settings into another kind of space and time, so that the feeling and meaning of familiar, quotidian realms are altered by temporary (re)design. Thus perception can be revealed as partial, habitual, and culturally informed when a familiar site is swathed in light and color, perhaps making it temporarily unheimlich, but simultaneously revealing unheralded, overlooked aspects. Enchantment can thus be reinstalled in festive illuminated landscapes, recapturing the oneiric dimensions of earlier modern nocturnal space. Such encounters with the dreamlike, surreal, and strange foster what Martyn Evans (2012) terms “wonder,” which he characterizes as an “altered, compellingly intensified attention” that saturates experience in the moment through which the world is made newly present to us. Under conditions of such intensified perception, we attend more intently to the previously overlooked or undervalued. The challenging experiences of seeing familiar space in novel ways also temporarily transforms place by communicating amazement, pleasure, and amusement, contributing to what Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick (2012, 36) term “the nocturnal carnivalesque,” which “defamiliarizes the city as well as opens it up to alternative interpretations and possibilities.” Festivals produce situations in which the usual “spatial functionali­

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ties become hidden and forgotten, signs become meaningless, directions reverse, boundaries cease to bound and the mundane is decorated and disguised and overtaken by different rituals and practices” (Picard and Robinson 2006, 11). This resonates with the Situationist strategies of détournement through which the habitual and the taken-­for-­granted are made strange (Knabb 2006). Yet rather than an obscure practice for a select few initiates, light festivals democratize the critical potential sparked by making the ordinary weird. The examples discussed here show how light festivals have the potential to make us see the world otherwise, to grasp that there is no innate reason why the usual arrangements should persist, that there are innumerable other ways of sensing the world, and that common sense can be overrated. Place Making While the production of defamiliarization through illumination might seem to alienate people from a sense of belonging, it may contribute to a deepening of the experience of place. In offering previously unanticipated ways of apprehension, soliciting perceptions that expand the capacities for imagining and sensing place otherwise, such approaches extend the compendium of ways of seeing. In this section, I focus on more specific approaches through which designers and artists contribute to place making and enhance belonging at light festivals. While the instrumental place-­ making endeavors of planners, government officials, and business elites might appear crass, at light festivals, temporary works that respond to the history and culture of place have the potential to expand affective, sensory, and cognitive belonging. One approach to festive light design is to conjure up references to histories that foment “a sense of belonging to and understanding of places, giving new meanings so that territories are repossessed” (Alves 2007, 1259). A salient example is provided by another large projection work at the 2009 Fête des Lumières in Lyon, digitally mapped onto the facade of the iconic, medieval Cathédrale St-­Jean-­Baptiste. The ten-­minute display, Les Bâtisseurs (The builders), told a story about the creation of the building itself. At the start, to the strains of classical music, an animated sequence summoned up the forest that was cleared to make way for the city, depicting the plants and butterflies that formerly swarmed there. After this, a preexisting, sixth-­century church was superimposed on the current building and then shown to collapse. Thereafter, the display showed how, with slide rule and ruler, the hand of the draftsman sketched out the architectural design of the twelfth-­century church. Subsequently, the carpenters,

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masons, and haulers who brought the stone to the site featured, augmented with the sound of chisels being struck and horse-­drawn carts, and then were replaced by the construction workers who drew up the stone blocks to the top of the cathedral with cranes and pulleys. Later, the hand of the architect returned, as more elaborate, ornate decorations changed the character of the building from Romanesque to Gothic, and the bell was hauled to the tower’s belfry as the building assumed its current form. Testimony was paid to the design of the famous fourteenth-­century astronomical clock inside the cathedral. Finally, the architectural designs were drawn aside to reveal the current architectural composition. Lights situated discreetly in the building highlighted key attributes, the towers and pilasters, the tracery of the circular rose windows, and the gargoyles, screens, and balustrades. In folding together different times and spaces, the projection focuses on how architectural designs and manual toil were integral to the cathedral’s emergence and ongoing transformation over the centuries. Besides deepening a historical appreciation of this construction, the display also conjures up a sensory feel for the past, with sounds of labor and hard physical endeavor honoring forgotten laborers and artisans. In addition, the display skillfully uses intense illumination to herald the cathedral’s key architectural features. Though it confirms the importance of the building’s iconic status to Lyon, the work reveals that neither place nor building possesses any essential qualities but is continuously emergent; some parts are added to the structure while other bits are subtracted. This necessitates the forging of new connections with places for the supply of replacement stone and the endless tasks of maintenance and repair, essential processes required to ensure that places endure as discrete material entities (Edensor 2011). Another example is provided by the Czech group Macula’s geometry-­ aligned projection onto Liverpool’s iconic Liver Building in 2011 to celebrate its one hundredth anniversary, which used its planes, axes, and structure. The display underpinned the building’s iconic value but evoked the port’s checkered history. Initially, an early castle was projected onto the lower part of the building, replete with silhouetted carts and human figures, but these were subsequently overshadowed by a huge, spectral incarnation of the grim reaper as the Black Death, breathing pestilence over the settlement. To symbolize Liverpool’s emergence as an imperial port, a ship’s prow thrust through the lower center of the building, followed by a visceral portrayal of chained, trudging slaves. The industrial revolution was connoted by the building’s conversion into a machinic assemblage compris-

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ing pistons and trains. The city then reemerged, assembled out of imported cargo, with a host of laboring workers manufacturing the ocean liners that superseded the sailing ships of earlier times. Following this were the sounds of the Blitz, as the port was subjected to heavy German aerial bombing in World War II, a smoky scene that finally mutated into images and sounds of the Beatles. Some of the key processes that contributed to the historical emergence of Liverpool were dramatized, focusing on the city’s unique heritage but also highlighting how it has been ceaselessly recomposed out of its connections with other places across time and space. In identifying the Europe-­wide pandemic of the Black Death, the foundation of the port’s economic power through the slave trade, the huge flow of ships and goods to and from many parts of the world, the city’s entanglement in World War II, and the global export of the renowned Beatles, the projection foregrounds how Liverpool, like everywhere else, is continuously reconstituted out of its relationships with multiple elsewheres (Massey 1993). Besides these grand historical narratives, more specific historical events can be effectively commemorated by different techniques of illumination. During November 7–­9, 2014, Berlin celebrated the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the fall of the Wall with a light installation that first retraced and then re-­erased the structure that separated the two parts of the city from 1961 to 1989. The Lichtgrenze, literally translating as “the border of light,” created by Christopher Bauder and Marc Bauder, consisted of eight thousand white rubber balloons tethered to slender carbon poles at the top of which were LEDs that gave the impression that the balloons were illuminated from within (“25 Years Fall of the Wall” 2014). Following fifteen kilometers of the path of the Wall, the Lichtgrenze prompted thousands of Berliners and visitors to hike along the former border after dark. At intervals, historic film footage was projected on screens along with historical testimony. After two nights, the installation culminated in its own dissolution: each helium-­filled balloon was released by its very own Ballonpate—­ “balloon patrons”—­as part of a synchronized sequence. No longer illuminated, they disappeared against the overcast sky, symbolizing the Wall’s obsolescence and the merging of East and West Berlin. Other works foreground forgotten or marginalized histories. A temporary work, Impermanence, was staged at Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne in 2014 by Yandell Walton (2014). This disused Catholic convent, now a community center, formerly served as one of the now notorious “Magdalene laundries,” where young “fallen women,” unmarried mothers and miscreants, ended up under the sway of the nuns, who subjected them

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to strict, sometimes cruel treatment. Before and after World War II, these young women worked in the laundries, carrying out their duties alongside the holy sisters. The elegiac light projection honors these former inhabitants in a currently derelict wing that lies open to the sky and is blocked off from public access by a thick wire mesh. Walton’s projection tracked the accelerated movement of daylight across the room and, simultaneously, the movements of two shadowy figures, a gliding nun and a young woman running in slow motion. The piece captured the dull routine of the laundry work and religious observance while contrasting the bodily movements of those who worked here, the sedate progress of the nun and the running girl, joyous in movement or maybe trying to escape. Keyframes, devised by Groupe LAPS for the 2013 Durham Lumiere festival, honored the disappearing heavy industries of the northern cities of England. Jiving along to a version of Lee Dorsey’s Working in a Coal Mine, by Durham County Youth Big Band, were eighty LED stickmen who danced across the facade of the former Durham Miners’ Hall, now a nightclub. The work referenced the building’s historical role as a center for miners’ social and political activity, and more melancholically, the subsequent demise of the region’s coal-­mining industry. These displays insert into the history of a place those who have been forgotten, “primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness,” and acknowledge key events in the making of place that may be a source of shame or loss (Gordon 1997, 196). Besides being deployed to highlight the forgotten histories and sites of places, light can also be manipulated to provide new perspectives on urban areas or buildings that may be overlooked or reviled. At Sydney’s 2014 VIVID festival, a somewhat unpopular brutalist building, the circular Commercial Travellers Association Building at the MLC Centre in Martin Place, was digitally mapped in the Urban Tree Project, devised by Ample Projects. The slender single column and three-­storied cylinders that make up the building’s unusual form were adapted to take on the appearance of a tree that started to grow from ground level, until completely subsuming the building, becoming populated with animals and blossoming flowers. Besides defamiliarizing this structure and its setting, the comparison of the building to a tree stimulated a renewed appreciation of its curious, unique shape. The tree also referred to the bushland environment that preceded the development of Sydney, perhaps looking forward to a time when the city will once more be taken over by vegetation, reminding onlookers about the changing nature of place over the long term. These examples highlight how light festivals are occasions when the

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Figure 22. Impermanence, Yandell Walton, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 2014. Shadowy figures from a marginalized history flit across the space of a former convent. Devised by, photographed by, and courtesy of Yandell Walton.

multiple qualities of place can be represented. This is especially pertinent with regard to how processes of globalization, it is often lamented, reproduce a cultural and spatial homogeneity that blurs the distinctions between places. Accordingly, festivals such as those discussed above offer occasions at which “individuals and groups can discursively manifest their visions of the world and create meaningful frameworks of their being together,” transmitting identities, cultural practices, and values to locals and outsiders (Picard and Robinson 2006, 12). The ways in which a sense of place is deepened, complicated, and enriched in these examples are ephemeral and express no desire to fix place identity, but they do propose critical perspectives about the meaning of places and their futures. Rather than a rigid, didactic heritage that reifies the import of particular historical characters and events, they offer a sensuous, imaginative engagement with the past that also puts back into place those that are in danger of being forgotten. Instead of grand, grave ceremonial events, these are informal and playful forms of commemoration. And in drawing attention to neglected spaces and unloved structures, they activate critical perspectives toward domi­ nant aesthetic values. It is clear that these creative approaches to place making are not synonymous with the branding and marketing efforts that

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emerge out of interurban competition and end up producing homogeneous and unsurprising places. Interactivity Fostering Conviviality A further key role of festive illumination is that it invites interactivity and public participation in ways that transform what may often be quiet, inactive public spaces into settings where conviviality, playfulness, and an expressive letting-­go temporarily take hold. These include the traditional festivities mentioned above, the Chinese Lantern Festival, Thadingyut, and Loi Krathong. Mike White (2009) depicts such parades as occasions when social inclusion, community participation, network building, and the reaffirming of bonds prosper, with people of various ages and backgrounds who are usually unlikely to collaborate with each other. These events can provide a source of well-­being and self-­esteem, and develop crea­tive skills. Such empowerment, as well as cultural revitalization, has taken place at Hoi An, a Vietnamese port town that increasingly gains economic benefit from mass tourism. Though an “invented tradition,” the monthly Lantern Festival has been adopted by locals to suit their own values and in accordance with their own cosmologies and place in the world. According to Michael di Giovine, the parades bring locals into a more equal relationship with tourists. Modern illumination, including vehicle headlights and televisions, is banished, and strings of traditional paper lanterns that embody a reinvigoration of craft traditions light public spaces. Crucially, the festival is promoted “as an ideal location for dates, where couples can share in an emotional and educational romanticization of their heritage” (di Giovine 2009, 221). Di Giovine also emphasizes that the event provides a sense of the past by conjuring up a time before modern technology, a practice that generates a “collective spirit of effervescence . . . an experience of communitas that transcends generations as well as social status” (225). A very different lantern parade is organized during the biannual Moonraking Festival in the town of Slaithwaite, Yorkshire, held on a February evening. The festival celebrates an early nineteenth-­century incident that occurred during a time when a group of local men profited from smuggling illicit alcohol via the Huddersfield Narrow Canal that passes through the town. One night, as they loaded barrels of illegal liquor from a barge, an exciseman appeared, causing the men to dump the barrels into the water. When they later returned to fish out the barrels, two more excisemen caught them in the act. Pretending to be inebriated, one of the men replied

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that the moon had fallen out of the sky and they were raking it out, tricking the officials into thinking that they were merely drunken fools. In cele­ brating this example of local cunning, the festival commences with a large paper lantern designed in the shape of the moon being hoisted out of the canal by crane. Subsequently, the moon lantern is carried at the head of a procession that includes several bands garbed in colorful illuminated decorations, and makes its way around the village for an hour or so. In 2015 the theme of the festival was “landmarks.” Hundreds of assembled schoolchildren and others of all ages, many wearing fancy dress, had designed lanterns out of paper and willow branches. The parade produced the surreal sight of a bobbing sea of famous destinations, including the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, the Angel of the North, and Sydney Opera House, above a sea of people. The success of the festival relies on locals being prepared to design and carry lanterns through the town’s dark streets. Both spatial defamiliarization and a sense of place are produced during the reenactment of the historical myth that ostensibly sets Slaithwaite apart by virtue of its antiauthoritarian, independent spirit. The procession inscribes a collective identity in space, binding participants together in a carnivalesque, loosely scripted performance. The bands add to the playful occupation of usually quiet streets, normally used for shopping, going to school, or walking dogs. The lanterns catalyze the energies of the streets traversed, especially when passing through and illuminating key sites in the local landscape—­the canal, bridges, church, and town hall. A dark passage underneath a railway bridge is particularly charged by this illumination, encouraging an increase in the volume of the bands’ music and shouts and singing from marchers. Bystanders line the road or lean out from the windows of adjacent houses, noisily cheering and waving to marchers, which in addition to the drinking and dancing that follows the end of the procession, supplement the production of an enhanced topophilia, consolidating collective belonging (Tuan 1974). The Moonraking Festival encourages a conviviality manufactured by local people themselves, as under the glow of lanterns they interactively shape space affectively, creatively, and expressively, forging a temporary communitas (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). Such events are far from neoliberal expressions of governance and commodification; they are produced by and rely on generosity, local pride, and the hospitable dispositions of participants (Hollows et al. 2014). The fostering of interactivity through illumination can create atmospheres of shared conviviality, silliness, and playfulness in less local, intimate

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Figure 23. Moonraking Festival, Slaithwaite, UK, 2015. Lanterns in the form of landmarks are carried through the town to celebrate a unique local historical event, underlining a sense of place and generating a strange and convivial atmosphere. Photograph by the author.

contexts, as exemplified by three attractions installed at Sydney’s 2014 VIVID Festival. The festival’s defining characteristic is the multitude of inventive ways that installations invite people to interact with light, a quality avowedly championed by the event’s organizers. This is epitomized by three adjacent harbor-­side attractions that encourage visitors to discard self-­consciousness

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and publicly perform in ways they usually would not, adding to the giddy atmosphere. Visitors can move between these attractions, engaging with them through different physical actions that loosen inhibitions. First, The Pool formed an area fitted with over a hundred concentric circular pads. Visitors leaped from pad to pad, producing a burst of color, the intensity of which varied according to the impact and weight of their landing. The pads also responded to the numbers of participants in brightness and the speed of the color change. On busy nights, the scene was of a multigenerational throng of people, jumping between pads, collectively generating dynamic patterns of color, and enjoying a tactile engagement with the soft plastic material and the swirling movement of bodies and light. Family members and friends crowded around the outside, urging each other to leap inside; teenagers tried to land on each pad with great force, laughter followed attempts by two people to vault onto the same pad, and myriad other playful interactions, improvisational maneuvers, and expressive movements took place. Second, Ray, a tall structure akin to a maypole, was activated by visitors when they pulled on one of three ropes to activate the illuminated colors that rapidly pulsed toward the top of the sculpture and then surged down its base in ever-­changing patterns. The quantity and flow of light depended on the energy with which the ropes were tugged.

Figure 24. The Pool, VIVID, Sydney, 2014. This interactive light attraction solicits a physical, expressive, and playful engagement. Devised by and courtesy of Jen Lewin. Photograph by Aaron Rogosin.

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People waited in line for a chance to pull on the ropes, subsequently trying out different rhythms and degrees of force. The third installation was Mirror Heart Ball, which took the form of a pulsing ballroom floor of changing colors bordered at one end by neon strips that formed a vertical heart shape. The floor was populated with large numbers of adults and children enthusiastically dancing to the song “Love Is in the Air,” and an equally large number of spectators. The display was inspired by the stage version of the popular Australian film Strictly Ballroom and served as the centerpiece for the Destination NSW float in Sydney’s 2014 Mardi Gras parade. The playful design celebrated both the expressive quality of Baz Luhrmann’s movie and the cultural significance of Mardi Gras, chiming with the camp, spectacular, expressive qualities of ballroom culture and Mardi Gras, as well as Sydney’s much-­vaunted liberal mores. The interactivity encouraged in these adjacent attractions drew in willing participants who were ready to move, shout, and perform in ways that contravene the usual norms of conduct in public space, inviting others to join in or soliciting the enjoyment of onlookers. A usually desolate area of the city in May and June was catalyzed into a ferment of fun and silliness. Another key interactive aspect of Sydney’s VIVID festival is the possibility for visitors to witness representations of their own bodies and faces in unfamiliar settings, at various scales, and in peculiar forms. For instance, a three-­dimensional installation Emergence, a large crystal shape embedded in the ground, in Martin Place, a busy city center thoroughfare, was transformed by the real-­time projection of visitors’ heads onto its form, augmented with patterns of illuminated color. It was a somewhat uncanny experience for visitors to see their own likeness staring back at them, like some mythical beast rising up out of the Earth to move among mortals. Emergence suggests the possibilities that may arise for designing the built environment through techniques of digital fabrication, three-­dimensional scanning, and generative design. The virtual presence of residents and visitors in public space perhaps heralds future democratic possibilities where citizens may contribute to the production of images across space, updating the graffiti tagger’s desire to mark his or her existence on the urban fabric. A more overt form of codesign was explored in Colour the Bridge, designed by 32 Hundred Lighting, which focused on the in situ illumination of Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge and was facilitated by a touch screen in a kiosk on the harbor’s north side. Visitors could choose colors from a broad spectrum to transform the appearance of the structure’s curved, horizontal, and vertical lines, enabled by the installation of two thousand LEDs. These

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Figure 25. Author’s head, Emergence, VIVID, Martin Place, Sydney, 2014. A three-­dimensional representation of the self in a large crystal embedded into the street, the attraction offers a peculiar experience of seeing a representation of the self in an unusual form but also suggests future technological possibilities for the codesign of the city by citizens. Photograph by the author.

elements could simply be painted with color or made to pulse with different mixes, enabling each user to create unique patterns. The display was also a profoundly playful installation that allowed expressive creativities to be enacted at the touch of a button. Such attractions signify the possibilities of smart, interactive technologies: of interacting with responsive technologies daily, receiving various information across space, and demo­ cratically participating in the design of the city by scanning images of ourselves, ideas, representations, and objects that can be projected onto the city’s material form. Such techniques have the potential to expand the mutability and flexibility of the city, allowing the marking of identities onto its surfaces, spreading meanings across space, and opening up possibilities for creative engagement and design. These particular installations also reveal how another form of inter­ activity emerges at light festivals: that constituted by the coming together of professionals to share ideas, techniques, and know-­how. As David Picard

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and Mike Robinson (2006, 14) emphasize, “Festivals form privileged arenas of cultural creativity” in which the novel, the prototypical, and the experimental enter the field. Groups of designers, artists, light technicians, computer technicians, and engineers may try things out in situ. These improvisational experiments can produce novel technical solutions and artistic effects, and success depends on how installations solicit or fail to induce forms of visitor engagement, an unpredictable matter. Such processes require that the festive environment be inclusive and open-­minded. Under such conditions, networks of association emerge in which ideas and expertise are shared and, according to Nona Schulte-­Römer (2013, 152), “offer different social groups open access and a variety of opportunities to share experiences and encounter the new.” For instance, Matthias Haeusler (2015, 144) discusses how Sydney’s VIVID festival has been a “crucible for lighting forms that facilitate the assessment of new lighting technologies” and serves as a testing ground in which experimental concepts and new smart lighting techniques can be tried out. These creative engagements among professionals supplement the mood of conviviality and a disposition toward playfulness solicited by interactive installations, suggesting that such festivals act as temporary “third places,” socially inclusive, relaxed, and unprescriptive public spaces beyond workplace and home (Hawkins and Ryan 2014). Space that usually serves as a location for everyday work, commerce, travel, and mundane tasks is transformed into a convivial playground, and the usual business-­like, unreflexive, and customary dispositions of habitués are suspended in favor of expressive behavior and carefree interactions with others, with self-­consciousness temporarily suppressed. This transformation of meaning, feeling, and function suggests that such spaces may be apprehended, practiced, and interpreted differently. As Quentin Stevens (2007) points out, festivals are ludic events, not necessarily experienced passively but frequently occasions for pleasure and fun. This seduction of people into a convivial attitude toward others and a more expressive engagement with space signals how play can circumvent instrumental practice and heighten affective belonging. Such practices are not synonymous with a romantic opposition to the established order, for as Tanya Woodyer (2012, 318) claims, “the politics of playing are primarily bound up in experiencing vitality rather than strategic oppositional endeavour.” Instead, they belong to those dimensions of the city that foreground the improvisational, the sensuous, and the peculiar. I suggest that light festivals are sites at which such qualities are especially encouraged through diverse developing practices.

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Conclusion Tripping, Defamiliarization, and Attunement In this chapter, I have acknowledged the salience of critical accounts which contend that contemporary festivals are manifestations of neoliberal attempts to commodify place, producing empty spectacles that coerce creative agents into producing compromised work and lull spectators into passivity. However, in foregrounding defamiliarization, place making, and interactivity as key features, I contend that light festivals can stimulate critical awareness about the specificity of perception, promote interrogation of the normative uses and meanings of place, bring to mind forgotten histories and neglected spaces, and generate conviviality and playfulness in otherwise lackluster places. Light festivals also serve as sites for creative and technical experimentation. In contrast to earlier carnivals, with their license for hierarchical inversion and excessive expression, contemporary festivals are characterized by regulated, conditional forms of transgression and hardly threaten to revolutionize space and society. However, there are many possibilities for the everyday world to be reenchanted, made strange, and encoded with alternative meanings and values, and many opportunities to stimulate imaginative approaches to the future. Indeed, new techniques being developed by light designers and artists are heralding novel ways in which the “technological uncanny” (Collins and Jervis 2008) of the early modern city might be regenerated, as perception is destabilized and scenes become replete with distortion, surprise, involuntary memory, and the unfathomable. The opening up of such experiences seems akin to Maria Cichosz’s (2014, 15) notion of “tripping” as “an affectively amplified part of a continuum of consciousness” through which we can become attuned to “the affective texture of the everyday.” The affective and sensory qualities engendered by festive illumination reconfigure space as abounding with openness and conviviality, providing conditions in which participants might take this further, into the everyday, in “breaking the complacency of habit” (58) and fostering an attentiveness to seeing and being otherwise. Can festivals continue to innovate and enchant with novelty, creating surprising ways to configure the world differently? Is there going to be a consistent stream of design, artistry, and technical advancements that will continue to delight, or will such efforts strain to appeal to an increasingly jaded public? In the next chapter, I discuss how light festivals, among other uses of illumination, are occasions at which powerful, shifting atmospheres can be created, generating a temporary, but perhaps more lingering sense of belonging.

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Chapter 6

Staging Atmosphere: Public Extravaganzas and Domestic Designs

Making Sense of Atmosphere Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to atmosphere, an aspect of life that is certainly familiar but difficult to pin down. In this chapter, I tease out some of the multiple ways in which illumination is a key constituent of the atmospheres of places and times, extending some of the discussions of the previous three chapters as well as introducing new concepts and examples. First, I outline how atmospheres can be distinguished before discussing how light is a vital element in their ongoing composition. I then discuss the skillful ways in which lighting professionals, the choreog­ raphers of large ceremonies, artists, and concert lighting engineers use illumination to stage different kinds of atmospheres. Subsequently, and returning to the light festivals discussed previously, I exemplify how atmospheres are not merely produced by event organizers and designers but are crucially coproduced by those in their midst. Drawing on festive and artistic installations, I argue that the energetic responses of participants belie notions of their mute attunement to preexisting atmospheres. Finally, I explore how specific cultural practices of illumination produce particular homespun atmospheres, vernacular creative endeavors that draw on an increasing range of technologies, designs, colors, and forms of radiance provided by the market. In attempting to capture something of their pervasive quality, Gernot Böhme (2013, 2) considers how atmospheres “imbue everything, they . . . bathe everything in a certain light, unify a diversity of impressions.” In combining multiple, changing elements, atmospheres condition our affective, emotional, and sensuous experience of the environments within which we are immersed. Though we may be familiar or unfamiliar with the atmospheric qualities of particular places, and refer generally to “the 139

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atmosphere,” we are rarely able to articulate their characteristics. Accordingly, Böhme also alludes to how powerful atmospheres may constitute “something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power” (3). However, he insists that they are intermediate phenomena, belonging in neither the world out there nor the individual person but invariably circulating between them. While the affective, emotional, or sensual charge of an atmosphere may permeate a setting, attuning our moods, it is also “the extendedness of my mood itself ” (Böhme 2002, 5). Atmospheres thus circulate between the objective and subjective. Diffuse, spreading atmospheric qualities suffuse all spaces and are enjoined by the moods and embodied responses of those present, but in some spaces, they more persuasively enroll the subject than in others. Cameron Duff (2010) contends that certain places are saturated with a sense of sensual, emotional, and affective belonging, while others are characterized by a thinner atmospheric charge. Thus the capacity of atmospheres to affect bodies and emotions varies in intensity. Indeed, we can readily distinguish between the atmospheres generated at particular settings. For instance, the surging moods and infectious atmospheres at large sporting occasions or rock music festivals contrast with the subdued, reverential intensity of a quiet spiritual realm such as a church. The atmospheric tones of the busy, impersonal excitement generated by hurrying pedestrians during the rush hour of a large metropolis differ enormously from the anticipatory impulses encouraged by the emerging sunlight and vibrant birdsong of an early spring morning in the English countryside. I shortly discuss the key role of illumination in contributing to atmospheres, but it is essential to grasp that though light may be a potent element, it is accompanied by myriad other elements. Atmospheres are characterized by their multiplicity, by dynamic energies and forces that combine to foster their continuous emergence, conditioning their power. Atmospheres are relational phenomena that enroll different configurations of objects, technologies, humans, and nonhuman creatures in an ongoing emergence typified by changing “qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements” (Stewart 2011, 445). As well as light, the quality of air, temperature, sound, smell, and textures adds to the tone of a place and event. The general mood might be tuned by absorption in everyday habit or by festivity or sober commemoration. Moreover, atmospheres are likely to be tuned according to recent personal experience, shared knowledge of local, national, or global happenings, or by previous associations connected to

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place and event, not to mention sudden occurrences. For instance, I have discussed how the atmosphere at well-­attended football matches continu­ ously changes in reaction to the unfolding events on the pitch and the conduct and mood of the crowd, as well as numerous other contingencies (Edensor 2015a). These coalescing elements underline how atmospheres entangle the material and immaterial in a fluid, ever-­shifting fashion, as the aggregation of elements with which they are composed change, some dissipating and others surging, adding to an ongoing mix of varying intensities. The ways in which we become entangled within atmospheric settings is discussed by Jean Paul Thibaud (2011, 209), who refers to how the “pervasive quality” of a “situation as a whole” “gets inside us,” orienting us toward particular actions and expressions. Thus rather than elicit any passivity, atmosphere “gives rhythm to our movements and modulates the manner in which we move,” providing the conditions within which we act. Familiar atmospheres, as much as the practical tacit knowledge associated with a deep familiarity with place, sustain the domestic settings in which we carry out repetitive habits, providing a context “that lays down root textures and motivations for movement and feelings” (Adey 2007, 439). On the other hand, exciting and festive atmospheres solicit the suspension of such habitual dispositions, encouraging immersion in special events. This integration of the social and the environmental underlines how it is essential to take account of the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which atmospheres emerge and dissipate, and grasp the attunement of some people to become absorbed within them. As Böhme (2013) contends, “the quasi-­objectivity of atmospheres is demonstrated by the fact that we can communicate about them in language,” yet he further asserts that the production of this intersubjectivity depends on a shared perception that “must have been instilled . . . through cultural socialisation.” This attune­ ment foregrounds the key roles of subjects in coproducing atmospheres in various ways. Indeed, designers depend on an acceptance of the atmospheres they produce, though they can never be sure whether a crowd will respond to the atmosphere unexpectedly, and they are unable to anticipate whether a blackout, sudden rainstorm, or newsflash will utterly transform the mood. Furthermore, while those comfortably familiar with particular atmospheres may well become happily immersed within them and contribute to their ongoing emergence, others may not be so similarly attuned to the setting or feel discomfort. For instance, at the fairground, the heady mix of loud music, shouts, and mechanical noises, the sensory disorientation instigated by waltzers and roller coasters, and the suspension of ordinary

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conduct among the crowd are irresistible for many attendees; others find the intense fairground atmosphere threatening and overpowering. Before considering the contribution of light to atmosphere, I address the theoretically convoluted relationship between affect and atmosphere in recent academic literature. Affect has been defined as “a sense of push in the world . . . a notion of broad tendencies and lines of force” that circulate through bodies, space, and things (Thrift 2004, 60). Like atmosphere, notions of affect usefully claim that affect is distributed across space, expanding understandings about the constitution of the social beyond the purely human. In decentering the individual human subject, conceptions of affect foreground how different configurations of objects, technologies, and (human and nonhuman) bodies come together to form different capacities and effects. This insistence on the relationality of the affective offers opportunities to explore how such actors and energies relate and are spatially distributed. However, certain accounts have also contended that such affective configurations are constitutive of “affective” atmospheres (Conradson and Latham 2007; Anderson 2009). Yet while the affectual is certainly a key element in atmospheres, atmospheres are not reducible to their affectual qualities. Rather, in their continuously shifting formation, they combine the affectual, the emotional, and the sensory. Atmospheres are multiply composed out of sensual elements as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they are emotionally and affectively consumed, interpreted, and engaged. To emphasize, affects, sensations, materialities, emotions, and meanings are all enrolled within atmospheres (Bille, Bjerre­ gaard, and Sørensen 2015; Edensor 2012). This focus on their affective qualities has led to further assertions that diminish a grasp of the rich dynamism of atmospheres. First, certain accounts infer that affect is composed of “transpersonal or prepersonal intensities” (Massumi 2002), in contradistinction to emotion as precisely the intersubjective expression of the feeling of these intensities “in a socio-­ culturally recognizable form” (McCormack 2008, 426), that is, translated into particular, communicable states of emotion such as anger, joy, and anxiety. This has produced an unfortunate binary understanding of affect and emotion in which each is conceived as a discrete condition (Pile 2010). While it is useful to conceptually distinguish affect and emotion from each other, these states are almost always thoroughly entangled, each possessing boundaries that are “amorphous and elusive” (Bondi and Davidson 2011, 595). Both thus belong to but do not determine the totality of atmospheres. Second, an exclusive focus on the affective qualities of atmosphere sug-

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gests that people are thrust into an atmospheric situation to which they have to attune, rather than usually being guided by norms of practice and response. This disregard for the anticipation and prior experience of those entering particular atmospheric fields suggests somewhat of a “mute attunement” to place or event, entirely devoid of political, social, and cultural orientations (Barnett 2008). Gillian Rose, Monica Degen, and Begum Basdas (2010, 338–­39) point to the inadequacy of considering space a realm that “precedes any individual body or subjectivity, and in which cognition, interpretation and motivation are rather minor processes.” Such conceptions wholly neglect to acknowledge how peoples’ prior sensory experience, cultural habits, or expectations might influence their responses to atmospheres. Besides ignoring any participation in the coproduction of atmosphere, such understandings fail to grasp the social, cultural, and historical contextualization that surround their experience and production. I insist that atmospheric attunement is frequently anticipated attunement, for emotions and affects “have a culture, history, seasonality, psychology, biology, economy and so on” that produce familiar experiential consistencies and recurrences (Smith, Davidson, and Bondi 2009, 1). In thinking about how light contributes to atmospheres, we might consider both the effects of glittering, glowing, or shimmering illuminations from afar as well as the light that encloses us. The light in any setting refracts, reflects, and is absorbed by the materialities that it shines on and media such as cloud, mist, and water that foreground the meteorological dimensions of atmosphere. The levels of daylight that shape the perceptual field to which we continuously attune are also manifest in the shifting variations and intensities of artificial illumination. The production of areas of glare, color, reflection, and shadow interacts with material and immaterial elements that constitute a scene. In chapter 1, I also discussed how colored objects “go forth” from themselves to tincture surrounding elements. Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen (2015, 32) further consider how what Böhme terms these “ecstasies” of a thing condition atmospheres, transmitting affects, emotions, and sensations across a setting, effects to which we respond and become attuned. It is thus evident that light has a powerful propensity to tincture surroundings and thereby provokes affective and emotional resonances in the sensing body, activating passions, instigating sensual pleasures and discomforts, and adding to the tone of place. Illuminations “radiate presence, projecting their qualities outwards and colouring the environs,” and as a key element in shifting atmospheres, illumination cannot be delimited, for it fades into darkness

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or blends with other lighting (Thibaud 2011, 211). Thus artificial lighting supplies various tones of feeling that influence notions about how to operate in particular spatial and social settings, and thereby provokes emotive, practical, and communicative responses that further contribute to atmosphere. The atmospheric effects solicited by illumination, as Allan Cochrane (2004, 12–­13) intimates, are manifold, revealing “texture, accent, spatial transition, visual cues, security and perception of security, moods, cerebral temperature and drama,” radiating diverse qualities of sparkle, glow, glare, highlighting, and diffusion. In what follows, I discuss how the multiple capacities of illumination are harnessed by professional designers to stage atmospheres, inspire those subsumed within the glow of light to coproduce atmospheres, and are deployed by householders to shape the everyday, vernacular production of domestic atmospheres. Staging Atmospheres with Light Böhme (2008, 4) contends that stage production techniques set “the conditions in which the atmosphere appears,” creating “tuned” spaces with tones, hues, and shapes that possess divergent affective registers and emotional intensities in performative, commercial, and festive realms. The notion that atmospheres might be staged emerges from theatrical contexts in which stage sets provide atmospheric backdrops to the dramatic action, attuning the audience to the unfolding performance of the actors (Böhme 2013). Beyond the theater, the production of atmosphere is a long-­ standing concern of the design professions: interior designers, stage managers, artists, light designers, and architects are explicit about the importance of atmosphere to their work (Borch 2014; Griffero 2014; Pallasmaa 2014). Interior designers assemble potential material elements on “mood boards” to experiment with how to tune places (Sloan 2014). And as Peter Zumthor (2006) contends, in paying attention to atmospheric qualities, architects must reach beyond qualities of form and construction. Thibaud suggests that increasingly “explicit strategies to sensibilize inhabited space” seek to transform the media through which we experience the world, the sounds, odors, lights, colors, temperature, and air quality that shape the conditions under which we apprehend place, to produce a tuned realm rather than a concentrated spectacle. As he asserts, “Urban design no longer just focuses on objects but also what is between the objects” (Thibaud 2015, 40–­42). Thus designers attempt to produce affective tonalities through such qualities as soothing sounds, lively tactilities, or aromatic ambiences.

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Thibaud further contends that the atmospheric management of most commercial spaces is not concerned with producing excitable or enervating effects. Instead, gentler sensory and affective tones are designed to produce a quiescent, carefully cultivated atmosphere that does not overstimulate those passing through. Here, the shopping mall is exemplary, with its background music, surveillance techniques that regulate customer behavior, and optimal lighting to showcase products, as Stephen Healy (2014) discusses. He argues that the production of a monotonous temperature chimes with a wider biopolitical control that induces a disorientated, somewhat languid corporeal sensibility. Supplemented by visual design, lighting, and modes of moving people, he asserts that an “involuntary vulnerability” is produced wherein shoppers, lulled into a state of distraction, are cajoled into spending by a plethora of visual blandishments, while carefully designed pathways guide them to designated sites and restrict somatic improvisation. Such pacifying urban atmospheres resonate with Trevor Boddy’s depiction of what he terms a “new urban prosthetics” that incorporates “incessant whirring,” “mechanical breezes,” “vaguely reassuring icons,” “trickling fountains,” and “low murmurings” that filter out “troubling smells and winds.” Such stagings, Boddy (1992: 123–­24) suggests, inculcate in inhabitants a toned-­down bodily expression so that there is “never a clenched fist, a passionate kiss, a giddy wink, a fixed-­ shoulder stride”; accordingly, those moving through such spaces coproduce the muted atmosphere. Yet the ways in which designed atmospheres close down or open up meanings and practices to improvisation, contestation, interactivity, and experimentation vary widely. A sole focus on the staging of powerful atmospheres by commercial interests and assumptions that their overwhelming effects hold those within their midst spellbound veers once more toward the suggestions of passive enthrallment critiqued in chapter 4. As Vincent Laganier and Jasmine van der Pol (2011) testify, light designers are well aware of the imperative to create atmospheres for the users of illuminated spaces, and awareness of these atmospheric potentialities is expanding as public spaces become increasingly aestheticized. This atmospheric staging with lighting is, however, far from new. In chapter 2, I discussed how daylight was skillfully deployed in the great Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe to combine the metaphorical, social, and phenomenological, thus captivating worshippers. The staging of artificial light and its imbrication with the various materialities through which it shone augmented the use of sunlight, demonstrating “the effect (of light)

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of the reflections and lustre of the objects on sight and the materiality of the objects” (Bille and Sørensen 2007, 269). The sparkling, glistening, and translucent materials that adorned shrines and altars reflected and absorbed candlelight, providing a numinous sacred magic. According to Nicholas Saunders (2002, 215), these mooted spiritual qualities embody “notions of the supernatural qualities of light and colour as embodiment of cosmological energy [that] were materialized in objects and validated in their myriad forms by artistic and ritual display.” The inflections of flickering light on the hollows, niches, and darker chambers of sacred space nurtured a blending of aesthetic, sensory, emotional, and affective apprehension that intensified spiritual experience. In Byzantine churches, as Sharon Gerstel (2006, 2) describes, candlelight was deployed to create “atmospheric enclosure  .  .  . palpable boundaries within sacred settings.” These discreet realms, as Claire Nesbitt (2012, 159) explains, produced a “stational way of moving around the building, the light provided an ethereal guide, inviting the viewer to the significant areas.” Illumination also successively picked out iconography, the colors of frescoes and the gold tesserae in mosaics, and shone over significant tombs in serving as “a currency of devotion placed as an offering to the icons,” with reverence “measured by the quantity of candles placed before the image.” The atmospheric experience of the cathedral thus flowed through the different interior spaces and was further charged by the passage of believers. The staging of candlelight at Durham Cathedral in the event “Free to Be,” as discussed in chapter 3, produces an impression of these medieval atmospheres of reverence. In chapter 4 I referred to Shanti Sumartojo’s (2015) discussion of the Australian Anzac Day commemoration and the potent deployment of both illumination and darkness to stoke a sense of shared national remembrance. The huge crowds that gather before dawn collect in the dark as an unseen mass that becomes apparent only once the sun casts its light, and this gloom is penetrated by dramatic lighting effects to further intensify the atmosphere. Moreover, the hour at which the ceremony is staged alludes to the predawn horror experienced by Australian soldiers in the Gallipoli campaign, soliciting empathy in the imaginations of attendees. Sumartojo also discusses the wild rejoicing of postwar celebrations on VE Day in 1945 at London’s Trafalgar Square, enhanced by a vivid illumination that had been made unfamiliar by the light deprivation enforced by the widespread wartime blackout: “Its affective impact relied on the contrast between the illuminated streets and the gloom they [Londoners] had become accustomed to.” The event enhanced the transformation of the city and sym-

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bolized national endurance and release after six years of devastation and deprivation. The illumination of the iconic square heightened the momentousness of the occasion and provoked sentiments of “national unity, timelessness and stability,” in combination with a more unrestrained, carnivalesque jubilation that contributed to an especially fervent atmosphere (Sumartojo 2014, 65–­68). The contemporary spectacular staging of atmosphere via illumination ranges from opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games to national rituals. London’s opening Olympic ceremony marked the forthcoming sporting extravaganza with a spectacle of music, drama, and vast swathes of illumination. Angharad Closs Stephens (2015, 4) demonstrates how at such events, “feelings of togetherness” emerge through singing and coordinated mass choreography, as affective and emotional currents pass between spectating bodies and “sound, music, colours, patterns, postures and gestures combine to generate national affective experiences.” The already attuned audience was enmeshed in a spectacle intensified by the outpouring of illumination that cascaded down and across the stadium. More ubiquitous are the light displays that accompany performances of popular music acts, focusing intensely on the stage and radiating across the audience, with special effects, projections, and animations of varying complexity. Such illumination is deployed in increasingly sophisticated ways to synchronize with the rhythms of the music, accentuate particular beats and melodic tones, and generally enhance the affective and emotional depth of the experience. The spreading glow of dry ice, the blast of white light that heralds a climactic moment, the pulse of strobe lighting that defamiliarizes the setting and disorientates perception supplement the atmospheric effects of the music. These dramatic effects are augmented with the spotlighting of performers at key musical moments and lasers that strafe the audience and pick out individuals and groups. Strikingly, Monica Degen, Claire Melhuish, and Gillian Rose (forthcoming) explore how representations of atmosphere have become a mainstream commercial practice of architectural and urban branding through the use of computer-­generated images that visualize future urban redevelopments in Qatar. These virtual atmospheres conjure up a soon-­to-­be regenerated swathe of Doha’s historic center, featuring intense luminosity and color, fireworks, suggestions of movement via blurred figures, varied and playful activities, and convivial social interaction. Though the staging of atmospheres of light discussed so far largely focus on instrumental design, whether for religious, nationalistic, or commercial

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aims, atmospheric illumination is also mobilized in the production of more imaginative events. To exemplify this, I return to Durham’s 2013 Lumiere light festival to look at an evocative installation created by the artist Ron Haselden (Edensor 2015b). Festive events produce diverse affective, emotional, and sensual forces, and as visitors move between differently tuned settings, they experience ever-­shifting atmospheric intensities that in turn solicit different kinds of movement, noise, and somatic communication. Haselden’s Fête offered a somewhat more subtle experience than most of the other illuminated attractions on offer at Lumiere. The work was inspired by a visit to the Fête de Blé in Pleudehen in rural Brittany, France, an event that included, according to the artist, “Bretonne dancing, parades of past farming costumes, tools, teams of horses slowly turning a vast capstan to grind the wheat . . . all enhanced by drinking Bretonne cider” (pers. comm., September 2, 2014). The installation was located on a rather lonely stretch of parkland adjacent to the River Wear, which runs through the city. Somewhat detached from the flows of people that surged between illuminated attractions in the crowded town center, the location contrastingly provided unpeopled space and quiet. Pedestrians were lured into the park by dozens of strings hung from poles and adorned with carnival lightbulbs arranged as a canopy, enclosing the bodies that walked beneath. The lights switched on and off in regular sequence, accompanied by alternating sequences of fairground music synchronized to match the rhythm of the animated light. Haselden explicitly acknowledges that Fête “is a mood work  .  .  . The canopies of chase sequencing lights create the mood/arena for waltzing dancing or wandering around, on your own, under the night sky” (pers. comm., September 2, 2014). At Durham the installation conjured up the atmosphere of an abandoned or recently finished fete or fair, a sense that what had been a vigorous and joyous communal event had now finished, and the party was over. Here, the location of the site compounded a sense of movement into a sphere of quiet stillness, inducing silent reflection and a meditative, rather melancholy atmosphere. This melancholy was inflected with a sense of the sudden absence of a carnival that had temporarily catalyzed nocturnal space. The restrained sound and lightscape provoked a contrasting sense of what was there before, the swirl of bright, flashing lights, gaudy images of glamour, clanking and whirring rides, shouts of stallholders, hysterical laughter, squeals of fright, and animated conversations. The particularly thick, giddy atmosphere of the fair or carnival is brought to mind by its sheer contrast with the quiescence of Fête.

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Figure 26. Ron Haselden, Fête, Durham Lumiere, 2013. This evocative mood work generates a powerful atmosphere, melancholy, and nostalgia. Devised by, photographed by, and courtesy of Ron Haselden.

The installation also solicits a sense of nostalgia generated by shared remembrance of the fairs and fetes we have attended and the brief sense of communitas they may have fostered. This is especially pertinent at the Durham site, for it is a venue that continues to host traveling fairs and is thereby subject to the atmospheric transformations wrought by such temporary events, perhaps invoking an enhanced topophilia toward this location for local residents (Tuan 1974). Yet Fête has been staged in many other venues. As Haselden remarks, the work “changes with each location,” its interpretation and impact varying according to the cultural and historical contexts in which it is set, contexts that influence the formation of atmosphere. For instance, a completely different atmosphere was produced when the installation was situated in a French roadside parking area. Here, according to Haselden, “people would pull up in their cars and waltz in it,” transforming the site into a performative and convivial setting. Yet wherever it is located, Fête has a propensity to induce an atmosphere that resonates with other times and places. Accordingly, Fête underlines how powerful atmospheres staged with light are not necessarily those in which vibrant colors, vigorous animation, and other spectacular effects produce a great hubbub or demand rapt attentiveness.

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Coproducing Illuminated Atmospheres I have emphasized that atmospheres should not be conceived as pervasive environmental conditions within which people are suddenly immersed. While it may be the case that deeply unfamiliar settings can occasionally induce feelings of becoming captured by overwhelming atmospheres in which we are involuntarily swept up, most of the time we enter atmospheric fields with which we are broadly familiar, which we may well have anticipated because of prior experience, and which we transform by our presence. Recent theories of affect have tended to discount social and cultural contexts (Tolia-­Kelly 2006; Rose, Degen, and Begum 2010), assuming a mute attunement to the circulating intensities that contribute to atmospheres, thereby neglecting how affective experience is “a cumulative, and therefore historical, process of interaction between human beings and place” (Kobayashi, Preston, and Murnaghan 2011, 873). Affective experience is partly conditioned by the social connections and understandings that preclude their formation, and as I have insisted, affect is supplemented in the ongoing generation of atmospheres by emotional and sensory circulations. For instance, as Cameron Duff and David Moore (2015, 311) contend, though the atmospheres of Melbourne’s drinking spaces “prime” drinkers toward antisocial behavior or sociability and fun, they can be “modulated, compounded or resisted.” Moreover, engagements with atmospheres can articulate contemporary cultural practices and foreground particular identities, but it is also essential to recognize the historical contexts of atmospheres. As Friedlind Reidel (2015, 98–­105) contends, “Individuals, sentiments and emotional currents shift alongside and in relation to larger-­scale atmospheric movements” and are therefore “embedded in the currents of history and . . . productive in forming pasts and futures.” Festivals are useful occasions that reveal how illumination can transform the experience of space and time, defamiliarizing and augmenting a sense of place, and consequently charging atmospheres with occasionally overwhelming effects. Yet crucially, festivals also enroll bodies into coproducing the experience by encouraging forms of interactivity. The partici­ pating lantern makers who carry their creations through the streets of Slaithwaite produce a thick atmosphere that fluxes, intensifying at particular junctions where the procession passes underneath railway tunnels or reaches the end of the march, and becomes more subdued on quieter, darker stretches of the walk. The crucial issue here is that the pedestrians carrying their lanterns are integral to producing this particular fluid

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atmosphere. This is also the case at the interactive installations of Sydney’s VIVID festival, where the engaged participation of festivalgoers generates a carnivalesque atmosphere in concert with the sensory and affective qualities of the illuminations themselves. Laughter, shouting, the communication between participants, their expressive physical gestures and ludic disposition are key elements in producing the festive ambience that circulates across the event, escalating around particular illuminated installations. Such festive activities seem to promote what  Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (2014) call “convivial multiculture,” generating a transformative atmosphere that fosters an inclusivity in which social and cultural distinctions dissolve. The participation of visitors is thus essential to the coproduction of these atmospheres, their expressive engagement and active communication responding to illuminated space, creating tones of conviviality or excitement that add to the medley of atmospheric constituents. Furthermore, tacit knowledge of the kinds of atmospheres into which they enter serve as a guide to action, offering cues about comportment, for instance, in soliciting an awareness that we may suspend normative conventions and adopt a more ludic disposition along with other festivalgoers. These forms of awareness underline how engagements with particular atmospheres are rarely solely precognitive, for previous encounters provide a relational context for experience and practice. Indeed, those drawn to potent atmospheres, and familiar with them, are quite able to articulate the presence of atmosphere as a quality to which they are attracted and are attuned. The coproducers of illuminated atmospheres are frequently guided by well-­ entrenched anticipations, as I now discuss with regard to visitors to Blackpool Illuminations. At Blackpool, those walking along the seafront are coaxed into shifting atmospheric fields as they are drawn to particular illuminations, zones, and surrounding attractions, immersed in successive emotional phases or pools of affect within a seething space of movement, sensation, light, and dark. More specifically, illumination continuously changes in color, glare, level of animation, and form of representation, qualities that oscillate, diminish, and blaze, inculcating a focus on the lights and how they tincture surrounding spaces and materialities. Yet besides being conditioned by these ever-­changing illuminated scenarios, the flow of atmosphere is profoundly affected by animated modes of social communication and spatial engagement.

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Figure 27. Postcard, Blackpool Illuminations. A convivial atmosphere has been produced at the illuminations since the early twentieth century, and hence it provokes an air of nostalgia for the millions of repeat visitors. Photograph by the author.

Blackpool has historically released working-­class bodies from everyday industrial discipline, feeding them, whirling them round, getting them drunk, immersing them in sea and sand, and bedazzling them with lighting. For many, the temporal breaks constituted by visits to the resort are regular, and though the seaside offers an alterity to the everyday scenario of work and home, holiday dispositions are well known and rehearsed. For many visitors, a deep connection with the resort and its illuminations is grounded in repeated annual visits, part of long-­standing family “traditions.” For such people, the Illuminations are somewhat of an “institution” that they remember attending as children, along with relatives, a continuity that underpins the conviviality of the event and how it is woven into family lives. Practical conventions of visiting the Illuminations are thus grounded in arriving at particular times, adopting particular routes, taking breaks for food and other amusement, communicating with others, and articulating feelings. The performance of these practical habits incorporates animated verbal exchanges with strangers, laughter and playful silliness, and expressive physical performances, gestures, and dancing—­often in relation to the lights—­that, crucially, are coproductive of the atmosphere, not to mention the purchasing of novelty illuminations from street traders that are worn on the body and waved around. Moreover, these familiar dispositions and

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practices are frequently oriented around emotional and affective expressions of nostalgia, conviviality, continuity, and family. The potency of the illuminated atmosphere at Blackpool thus depends on the reassembly of those who have been part of previous atmospheres who annually arrive to participate in a well-­rehearsed, familiar “reverberation in the same, or at least in a similar manner” (Reidel 2015, 105). Along the illuminated seafront at Blackpool, a host of “predisposed routines, emotions and movements” are activated, and these are not merely stage-­managed (Adey 2007, 444). While the designers of the Illuminations undoubtedly aim to encourage playful consumption, sensation, and movement, to produce cheer and lightheartedness, the atmosphere also depends on the anticipation, tacit knowledge, and social involvements generated during a collective visit. This is an integral part of the flow of atmosphere coproduced by the active absorption of visitors and their successive immersion, engagement, distraction, and attraction along the seafront. The medley of multicolored lights, flashing, glowing, and pulsing, is supplemented by the animated conversations, laughter, and movements that ripple across space. Blackpool Illuminations also provide a site at which the relationship between the nonrepresentational qualities of atmosphere and the representational impact of particular light designs can be interrogated. Margaret Wetherell (2012, 22) contends that certain theories of affect are not well served “by dividing representation from the non-­representational, marking out the former as the province of consciousness and deliberation, and the latter as the province of the unconscious and the unconsidered.” So it is with atmosphere, where symbolic, emotional, affective, and sensory impacts merge. Ben Anderson (2009, 80) maintains that atmospheres “mix together narrative and signifying elements and non-­narrative and asignifying elements,” a melding particularly exemplified by the asymbolic and symbolic qualities of light. This is appositely captured by Walter Benjamin’s (1997, 476) assertion that commercial lighting is apt to transcend its function: “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—­but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.” Blackpool Illuminations are saturated with references to popular cultural motifs that carry semiotic weight and provoke emotional responses from visitors, who react with enthusiasm or antipathy to well-­known characters from fiction, television, and film, and pop stars and comedians. Though these designs inspire emotional responses, they are also always more than representational, with their symbolic and

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referential qualities complemented by the affective, nonrepresentational properties of glare, brightness, color, animation, sparkle, and glow. The illuminated atmospheres at Blackpool thus incorporate both the symbolic and nonrepresentational qualities of lighting, and are coproduced by the animated verbal and physical expressions of responsive visitors as well as myriad other elements that circulate around the seafront (Edensor 2012). Though this coproduction by designers and visitors is apparent, this may not be so evident at other events and in other places, where the stage managers of light seem to exert a greater control over the flux and intensity of atmosphere. In particular, the highly choreographed deployment of illumination staged at the Nazi Nuremberg rallies seems to testify to the potential for lighting to generate atmospheres that irresistibly sweep participants up in their intoxicating, noxious atmosphere. However, in other contexts, the coproduction of illuminated atmospheres by those for whom they are intended highlights the variable efficacy of methods to condition atmospheres by designers, artists, architects, and stage managers. To exemplify this limitation and the extent to which engaged participation can destabilize the intentions of designers and transform the atmospheres that circulate around sites, I discuss an artwork installed in London to commemorate the start of World War I. During August 4–­11, 2014, residents and visitors could witness an ambitious light installation, Spectra, designed by Ryoji Ikeda and sited in Victoria Tower Gardens next to the Palace of Westminster. The work was formed by a twenty-­meter grid of forty-­nine searchlights that blazed upward into the sky from dusk to dawn. As night fell, Spectra could be seen from a distance from multiple locations, seeming to constitute a single column of vivid white light ascending some fifteen miles into the firmament. It constituted an unmissable point of light, supplementing the pared-­down urban vista of the illuminated city, defamiliarizing the skyline and charging it with a sense that something momentous was happening or being commemorated. Variations of Ikeda’s installation have appeared in several other cities, and like Haselden’s Fête, new associations and relationships are forged in each location. Most obviously, because the symbolic commemoration of war was widely broadcast across the UK in the mass media, the powerful beam conjured up the searchlights that crisscrossed London in both world wars. Indeed, many reviews of Spectra referred to the remark of Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary of that era: “The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-­time.” Clearly, the instal-

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lation of the work was intended to solicit the observance of this seminal event, at least as far as the politicians and urban managers responsible for its commission were concerned. Yet a visit to Spectra, just before midnight, revealed that as the source of the beam was neared and all searchlights were separately visible, the work took on an entirely different aspect to its commemorative function. Once the installation was confronted more closely, the symbolic resonances of the piece diminished, with its sheer scale, affective and sensory impact, and intensity of the illumination predominating. Collectively, the vertical projection of the gridded beams produced a giant, immaterial cube that enclosed visitors. The unreality of this transformed space was augmented by the ways in which it framed the palace, the trees, the clouds, and the intermittently visible moon, and further enchanted by minimal electronic music that drifted across the park. As Ikeda acknowledges, from a distance “it looks monumental and solid, but when you are in it, it is entirely meditative. People stare up in wonder. It causes necks to strain. The experience is so pure and direct” (quoted in O’Hagan 2014).

Figure 28. Ryoji Ikeda, Spectra, Victoria Tower Gardens, London, 2014. This installation intended to commemorate World War I is transformed into an occasion and a site at which a late-­night carnivalesque atmosphere reigned. Photograph by the author.

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Though late in the evening, hundreds of people had been attracted to Spectra. Within the environment formed by the beams and across the surrounding lawns there was a carnivalesque, excitable frenzy of movement and chatter, belying any expectation that visitors would soberly observe the commemoration of the start of World War I. Many people moved among the luminaires, weaving between separate fixtures and one another in a tight swarm, waving arms or positioning their faces above the searchlights while soliciting their companions to take photographs. Some adopted a more contemplative disposition, lying on the nearby grass, staring up into the disappearing points of light as they converged into a single beam miles above; others drank wine or conversed. Spectra thus fostered an excitable scene of interactivity, sparking collective playfulness, effusive discussion, and lingering fascination as people shifted and stretched out through the park, becoming attuned to the unusual illuminated environment. Affective intensities gathered and dispersed, as groups departed the scene and new clusters arrived, becoming absorbed into the rhythm of the event and producing surges of excitable behavior when the chimes of Big Ben interrupted the passage of events or the moon suddenly shone through the clouds. People contributed to the scene in accordance with their own affective, emotional, and sensory responses to the installation. The conduct of visitors to Spectra highlights how the staging of illumination to produce particular atmospheric effects can be confounded by those who react playfully, irreverently, and convivially, thereby transforming the flow of atmosphere from sober to carnivalesque. Producing Homespun Atmospheres with Interior Illumination The coproduction of illuminated atmospheres discussed above reveals that the staging techniques deployed by powerful commercial, political, and artistic agents form only one, albeit key, element in producing atmosphere. In this final section, drawing attention to how atmospheres also suffuse everyday, mundane space, I consider how household members use an array of lighting designs and procedures to orchestrate the atmospheres of their homes. The production of domestic atmospheres is a key concern among an increasing number of design-­conscious, reflexive householders who are informed by the expanding opportunities offered to consumers by the lighting design industry. However, the use of illumination to foster particular aesthetics and atmospheres is not new. Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988) elaborates on

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how the nineteenth-­century expansion of domestic gas and electric light was accompanied by reflexive endeavors to shape mood and atmosphere in the home. He explains how many householders initially refused to use the newly supplied gas, for they preferred the warm glow offered by fires, candles, and paraffin and oil-­lamps around which families gathered to converse or read, sources of light regarded as more conducive to a cozy domestic atmosphere. Perceptions about the harshness of gas and electric light also stimulated householders to modulate the daylight that poured into rooms by diffusing and dampening the sun’s rays with muslin and gauze curtains. The gradual penetration of the flatter tones of electric light into the home provoked householders to decorate interiors with a greater range of colors as well as installing Tiffany lampshades. Toning down the brightness of artificial and natural light, and using color on walls and in stained glass to bestow a mild radiance on rooms, kindled atmospheres in the increasingly private bourgeois home. The Victorian era in Britain also saw the emergence of the modern Christmas, which included imported customs of illuminating the tree with candles, a tradition that has continued and expanded—­most recently with the aforementioned garbing of house exteriors with vibrant illumination. Jennifer Mason and Stewart Muir (2013, 615) explore how festive design and domestic rituals annually sustain the atmospheres of family Christmases. Key ingredients include adorning the tree with ornaments and lights, putting up decorations, emptying stockings and unwrapping presents, pulling crackers, feasting, and playing games. This dense accumulation of home-­making procedures constitute a sequence of “embodied and material practices, happenings and stimuli” that can generate a rich festive atmosphere in the home. Collective practices involving illumination are integral to the production of distinctively festive atmospheres in domestic spaces, yet most of the time, homespun atmospheres are produced in more mundane circumstances, informed by forms of tacit knowledge, shared tastes, and moral conventions. The production of such everyday illuminated atmospheres is investigated by Sarah Pink and Kerstin Mackley, who have carried out ethnographic research that identifies these everyday, often unreflexive though sometimes improvisatory adaptations to domestic circumstances. As part of an embodied way of being and knowing familiar space, their research participants made their homes “feel right” sensorially and affectively through routine practice. These everyday modes of sensing space included the habitual modulation of light

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and darkness in the “making and maintaining of the atmosphere of the night-­time home,” for instance, by maintaining quiescence and darkness as other family members slept (Pink and Mackley 2014, 5). This research focuses on how individual family members condition domestic atmospheres. More extensive, widely shared cultural practices of toning homespun atmospheres is exemplified in Bille’s discussion of the Danish practice of producing coziness through lighting, a practice that extends into public and commercial spaces but is especially pertinent in producing domestic aesthetics. This affective and aesthetic orchestration of space to maintain the condition of hygge, loosely translated as coziness but also connoting intimacy, conviviality, and enclosedness, by deploying hyggelys, or “cozy-­light,” is a key element of Danish national identity, widely practiced in the long, dark winter months. The widespread use of candles and other forms of low-­level illumination tinctures the surroundings, blurs the boundaries between things, and shapes a vague, enfolding, intimate space, whose outside devolves into gloom. Bille indicates how hygge is maintained through continuous modulation as switches are used to monitor light levels and candles are moved around and replaced to maintain an atmosphere conducive to relaxation, coziness, enclosure, and convivial informality but also, according to different registers and intensities, solitude. He also points to how light is used “visually and affectively in everyday life to connect and separate people and things through the atmosphere it creates,” reiterating collective conventions and reproducing shared habits of lighting interiors that reinforce a broader sense of community. Such social and cultural connection is established by reproducing distinctive relations between outside and inside, whereby hyggelys cast from within the house is seen by those outside, a visibility that forges “a way of connecting with people and creating an image of openness,” reinforcing normative social aesthetics and expressions of being together (Bille 2015, 60–­61). This shared light culture allows those attuned to its aesthetics to feel at home, secure and part of a wider community. However, those who do not accord with such practices, for instance, migrants who use brighter forms of domestic illumination, are transparently not part of these national atmospheres. So important is the production of hygge to Danes that though government policy has insisted that incandescent light bulbs be phased out on the grounds of nonsustainability, many people have hoarded them while scorning more energy-­efficient LEDs. The supposedly colder color temperature of the LED is conceived as inimical to the produc-

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tion of hygge, atmospherically sterile and lacking the cozy glow germane to intimacy, conviviality, and relaxation (Bille 2013). In other cultural and geographical contexts, different traditions inform the aesthetics and atmospheres of home. For instance, Inge Daniels (2015) shows how illumination is deployed in Japanese homes as part of a brightness associated with modernity. In another example, Bille discusses how the window glass in Bedouin dwellings in Jordan is tinted green to symbolically keep evil spirits at bay, spreading a greenish light throughout rooms and radiating light outward at night. The green light connotes divine presence and thereby entrenches everyday feelings of domestic comfort. Interior central artificial illumination also minimizes shadows in which malign forces might lurk, further contributing to the domestic atmospheres to which Bedouin are habitually attuned. A final example comes from a very different cultural context, namely, Canadian off-­gridders (Vannini and Taggart 2013b). In the wilds of nature, these off-­gridders adopt self-­reliant, creative strategies to harness the sunlight needed to power their homes. Though illumination tends to be less intense and in shorter supply than that of grid-­based homes, the satisfaction of off-­gridders is inspired by the fact that only through their resourcefulness can its supply be guaranteed. Accordingly, a sense of domestic well-being is generated by these accomplishments, and illuminated atmosphere cannot be dissociated from this practical self-­sufficiency, as well as a disposition to comfortably accommodate themselves to this smaller amount of light. The examples discussed above highlight the specificity of the cultural values and practices that inform the production of homespun atmospheres with illumination. Though these geographical specificities remain strong, the provision of an enormously expanding range of lighting technologies is offering wider possibilities for householders to orchestrate the atmospheres of their homes. For instance, in the UK, the formerly dominant central ceiling light is increasingly replaced or augmented by portable lamps, novelty lights, standard lamps, spotlights, nostalgic items such as lava and Tiffany lamps, candles, and wall lights, among numerous other options, that allow domestic space to be reconfigured according to season, purpose, and frame of mind. The atmosphere of individual rooms may be regularly altered, and different rooms in a single dwelling may be bestowed with different tones and moods. In addition, the advent of switches that permit subtle gradations in light intensity to be modulated, interactive software that encourages the use of variable and shifting color radiance, and animated installations offer

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multiple options to increasingly reflexive, design-­conscious home owners who are attuned to the variegated emotional, sensory, and affectual palettes with which to orchestrate domestic atmospheres. Conclusion Though we may only become conscious of it when we are immersed in an especially potent setting, atmospheres pervade all the spaces and times we experience. Their ever-­fluid emergence incorporates a changing array of elements that combine and intensify, and mesh with our moods and those of others. Despite their often diffuse, ineffable qualities, the potential for atmospheres to condition our feelings about places, express power, and provide comfortable settings within which we feel at home or are alienated makes them worthy of exploration. Indeed, atmospheres have been present in all the examples I have discussed throughout this book—­in the convivial vibe generated by Chris Burden’s Urban Light, the oppressive tones of the stars atop the Kremlin’s spires, and the strange rurality conjured at the Enchanted Forest. In this chapter, I have insisted that light is an integral element of atmospheres. As discussed in the first chapter, it inflects everything with its radiance, toning and tuning the spaces within which we live. Light transforms the materialities on which it falls and the media that it suffuses, so that these elements radiate ecstatic effects beyond themselves within a relational field, tincturing surroundings. In focusing on artificial light, I have analyzed how atmospheres are staged by skilled practitioners such as theater designers, rock concert technicians, engineers of commercial spaces, organizers of large festivals and rallies, artists, and even virtual designers. Yet though the impact of these atmospheric orchestrators can be compelling in disseminating mood, meaning, and sensation, the subjective-­objective dynamic that produces the ongoing experience of atmospheres means that it can be resisted or that it may repulse those unwilling or unable to become attuned to it. Accordingly, in drawing attention to light as an interactive medium, I have insisted that atmospheres are coproduced by those within their midst. The examples I provide dispute notions that affect or atmospheres are entities into which we are suddenly plunged and passively entangled. People frequently resist newly imposed forms of lighting, as with the repulsion toward gaslight by nineteenth-­century householders, later dissatisfaction at the replacement of gas streetlights with the supposedly harsher glow of electric lighting, and the reluctance of Danish inhabitants to adopt LEDs championed by government (Kenny 2015). Such intrusions make

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space strange by negatively modifying atmospheric tones and moods. Moreover, we usually actively coproduce atmospheres, whether through mobilizing the anticipatory disposition that visitors bring to Blackpool Illuminations that shape their engagements and experiences, communally participating with interactive and festive light installations, or assembling with others and playfully improvising within the space produced by a captivating, superluminous, commemorative artwork, Spectra. Though teams of designers and artists have skillfully produced such effects, they are not merely passively beheld. In developing the argument against passive immersion, I considered how householders are not merely recipients of the affective and sensory engineering strategies of others but deploy illumination themselves to condition the atmospheres of their homes. In orchestrating domestic atmospheres, these inhabitants articulate shared symbolic and aesthetic conventions, expressing collective religious, festive, eco-­centric, national, and other cultural values that may be inclusive but can also act to exclude those unfamiliar with their arrangements or disinclined to modulate their home lighting in accordance with these cultural norms. These examples undergird the mundane uses and effects of illumination and echo the themes discussed in chapter 2 about how we become habituated to the play of light within the environments within which we dwell. In these everyday realms, we mobilize culturally specific ways of getting things done, of aestheticizing space and shaping its meanings with everyday fixtures. We organize ways of being comfortable, foster hominess, and align ourselves with particular rhythms. Accordingly, toning these domestic, mundane atmospheres through illumination is one of the overlooked practices through which we routinely reproduce space and the cultural norms, affects, sensations, and meanings it contains and which we impute to it, contributing to what Raymond Williams (1977) refers to as “structures of feeling.” These atmospheric qualities further underpin my contention that light is simultaneously symbolic, affective, and sensory.

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Part III Dark

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Chapter 7 Nocturnes: Changing Meanings of Darkness

An All-­Pervasive Darkness Darkness has largely been banished from the city through what Craig Kos­ lof­sky (2011) calls “nocturnalisation,” the expansion of social and economic activity into the night and the subsequent spread of illumination, a process that continues to be informed by moral and modernist discourses, as well as lasting fears about darkness. There are still urban areas that remain unlit after dark, typically swathes of wasteland or large parks, yet even in these realms, illumination surrounds the gloom and casts its light across them. As the nighttime economy extends into more areas of the city, light blazes away, banishing darkness from regions in which it formerly persisted. This accords with Murray Melbin’s (1978) characterization of illumination as a form of colonization, extending a frontier into the night’s darkness. This colonization continues to expand as nightclubs stay open later, leisure services and entertainment districts swell, all-­night retail outlets multiply, television never ceases, along with trading on the global finance markets, and urban districts service the needs of shift workers. Because we have become so habituated to the ubiquitous presence of electric illumination, it is now difficult to imagine the pervasive darkness that formerly saturated most space after nightfall. It is only in the last two centuries that this persistent gloom has been ameliorated, yet though it is a distant memory, cultural understandings about darkness continue to be informed by these earlier times. While the meanings and practices associated with dark space have been primarily negative, at least in Western culture, they have always been accompanied by those who cherish gloom. As I demonstrate, while contemporary overillumination has rendered it deeply unfamiliar, darkness is being pursued in novel ways and is being revalued as a positive condition that offers diverse experiences and unaccustomed sensations. 165

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These reconceptualizations of darkness should not blind us to the very real dangers, discomforts, and inconveniences that suffused everyday life before the dawn of widespread illumination. As Roger Ekirch details, numerous hazards imperiled those venturing out into the medieval town after nightfall. Piles of rubbish, filthy ditches and culverts, excrement-­ laden streets, and overhanging timbers provided some of the urban nocturnal risks, while those traveling beyond the city walls suffered accidents, stumbling into “fallen trees, thick underbrush, steep hillsides and open trenches” (Ekirch 2005, 123). It was not only hazards posed by the disordered streets, undulating landscape, and murky conditions that encouraged many to stay inside, for robbers, murderers, burglars, and arsonists might seek cover in the darkness. As cities grew, the subsequent increase in violent gangs and criminals provided further reason to stay indoors. To keep the real and imagined perils of the night at bay, householders performed the daily ritual of “shutting in,” bolting doors and positioning swords and cudgels next to beds to guard against nocturnal intrusion. To protect inhabitants against those who used darkness to conceal their nefari­ous activities, medieval towns typically organized a watch to guard against fire, interlopers, and unidentified nocturnal wanderers. In the dark, friends and foes could be mistaken, and all were apt to be subject to suspicion. Many towns locked the gates at night once sundown approached, prohibiting entry to those who arrived too late and were consequently consigned to spend the night in the greater darkness outside the walls. Gloom permeated the spaces inside most houses, with rudimentary candles providing small patches of light, a modicum of illumination amid the blackness. The sheer effort to maintain this flickering presence was unrelenting for households unable to afford higher quality night light, as inhabi­tants endeavored to keep the wick of the tallow fat candles trimmed to prevent excess smoke and the ever-­present threat that they would be extinguished. Outside the house, candles and lanterns were carried to light the way, but could easily be blown out by the wind. Later, in early modern cities, the services of linkboys could be purchased as guides through the dark streets, yet suspicions persisted that they might lead the unwary traveler into the clutches of criminal gangs with whom they associated (Schivelbusch 1988). Despite these unpropitious conditions, pervasive darkness also solicited the development of practical competencies. Knowledge of the constellations in the sky and the phases of the moon was common and could be used as guides through dark space when cloud cover was thin or absent.

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Similarly, visual skill in interpreting the dark forms and variegated textures of gloomy space was more acute. The path ahead could be discerned according to the multiple ways in which moonlight transforms landscape, the “changing colours and contours in its shape-­shifting light,” a variety of possibilities that, according to James Attlee (2011, 5), would be “too subtle for our modern eye to appreciate.” Those who customarily navigated through dark space became keenly aware of sounds and smells as a way to identify familiar spatial configurations. Distinctive surfaces and gradients underfoot became recognizable through an enhanced tactile sense of place and might be further enabled by making notches in surfaces by which to identify points on the journey. Inhabitants might also practice echolocation, using handclaps and shouts to pinpoint their whereabouts. Ekirch explains how parents would devise games for their children to inculcate regular exposure to darkness, taking them out on night walks and testing their predilection for locating place by touch, instilling a habitual, nonvisual sensory familiarity with local landmarks and hazards. These sensory skills highlight how darkness encourages the acquisition of a reconfigured visual and nonvisual sensory aptitude. Nyctophobia From ghoulies and ghosties And long-­leggedy beasties And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!

In medieval times, besides the evident threats it posed to health and safety, darkness was the occasion for all manner of invisible, spectral, ungodly forces to emerge, negative associations that continue to linger across Western popu­lar culture. In historical periods in which superstition was reinforced by fear of the unseen and the inexplicability of certain natural phenomena, as Jacques Galinier et al. (2010, 820) contend, “darkness plays an important symbolic role as a metaphor of pagan obscurantism—­deviancy, monstrosity, diabolism.” Negative associations of gloom continuously reemerge in medieval periods and extend into early modern eras as darkness continued to pervade nocturnal experience. In times when the extensive authority of the church shaped everyday understandings, with Satan at large on the Earth, and additional widespread belief in the power of a host of supernatural forces, it is not surprising that the night held multifarious terrors. Besides constituting the realm in which the devil carried out his work, his powers

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magnified, and his cohorts swarmed through dark space, a medley of other malign and peculiar spirits lurked, including imps, hobgoblins, ghouls, boggarts, and witches, and those especially linked with the dark such as night demons, black dogs, bogeymen, and the Norse dökkálfar, or dark elves. The shadowy night seemed to contain a host of insubstantial entities for imaginations stimulated by ghost stories, folk beliefs, and religiously inspired terrors. Even inside the house, visitations from ghosts and poltergeists were feared, inverting domestic space from a safe haven into an uncontrollable, uncanny realm. Outside, the sight of unusual phenomena in the landscape was interpreted as supernatural. For instance, the marsh gas emitted in swamps was conceived as a will o’ the wisp, a ghost light conjured by fairies to lure travelers to their doom by drowning. In contrast to the sinister forces that gathered in darkness, associations of light with divinity and goodness saturate Christian belief. This is underlined at the start of the Bible, in Genesis 1:2–­5, which describes how nothing existed, and all was subsumed in darkness, until God created light and saw that it was good and separated it from that darkness. In John Milton’s (2008, 83) Paradise Lost, this is poetically rendered: “Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung.” Yet the darkness of the Bible is of two kinds, as Elisabeth Bronfen (2008) points out, the black primordial nothingness that preceded God’s creation, and the night, with its stars and moon that came after, foregrounding the ambiguity of gloom. Yet notions that a metaphorical darkness preceded the advent of Christ and that the state of death is described as “darkness” and the “shadow” are deeply embedded in Western thought. In contrast, life, heaven, and salvation from death and ignorance is conceived as light, as exemplified in Ephesians 5:8: “you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.” Koslofsky (2011) identifies the continuing associations of darkness throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with witchcraft and devilry, heresy, sin and death, the struggle of the devout through “the long night of the soul,” where faith was threatened by temptation and terror. These negative Christian depictions were transmuted into narratives signifying the transcendent shift from dark to light that symbolized passage from medieval ignorance to rationality and science. The Enlightenment, as the term signifies, heralded a process that was explicitly concerned to “shed light on all things” in the pursuit of “truth, purity, revelation and

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knowledge,” embodying the ideals of “illumination, objectivity and wisdom” (Bille and Sørensen 2007, 272–­73). According to Michel Foucault (1980, 153), Enlightenment discourse drew attention to “the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths,” the ignorance that shrouded knowledge and kept people in the dark. The metaphorical meanings of the term enlightenment have been consistently aligned with a belief in the progressive and moral desirability of actually banishing darkness. This is captured in a maxim from the pioneering electric light entrepreneur Thomas Edison, that if we “put an undeveloped human being into an environment where there is artificial light . . . he will improve” (quoted in Ekirch 2007, 207). Actually and symbolically, illumination banished the condition of darkness. Such effusions reached their apotheosis in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurist manifesto of 1909 with the espousal that we should aim to “kill the moonlight” in the surge toward a dynamic future of technological advancement and efficiency. Marinetti regarded moonlight as synonymous with superstition and traditional myth, and an inferior source of nocturnal illumination that should be erased by brilliant, human-­made lighting (Attlee 2011). The permeation of this fear of the dark—­nyctophobia—­and these religious and modern allusions that cross cultures, spaces, and times extend into other judgments, with darkness persistently linked with negative understandings of particular settings. British racist colonial discourse assigned Africa as the “Dark Continent,” replete with animist and idolatrous faiths, ignorance, and barbarism, qualities that could be overcome by the enlightening “civilizing mission.” In the bourgeois imagination, the metaphor was extended to identify “Darkest London,” the realm of the rookeries and slums in which the slothful, criminal, feckless classes lived and which required urgent social reform. In eighteenth-­century urban America, the upright, morally conscious imagined that “rakes, scavengers, and thieves made their way through the inky blackness of the streets” (Baldwin 2004, 751). Such lurid imaginaries and negative references continue to imbue Western thought and language. We speak of the “Dark Ages,” “dark forces,” “dark deeds,” “dark thoughts,” and the “dark side.” Such allusions still pervade contemporary cultural values. In nineteenth-­ century bourgeois thought, darkness symbolized the decadence that had to be overcome in order to create a city of responsible, autonomous, rationally oriented, liberal citizens (Otter 2008). Not only did darkness signify backwardness, a hindrance to modern urban efficiency, regulation, and health, but it was also conceived as an obstruction to moral behavior and

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entwined with a profound sensory impoverishment. More recently, the emergence of “dark tourism” connotes the contemporary tendency to visit places of atrocity and suffering, and in popular science fiction literature and cinema, scenarios that herald a forthcoming apocalypse or dystopia frequently deploy darkness as a metaphorical descent toward brutality, and de-­evolution. Furthermore, Yi-­Fu Tuan (1978, 8) contends that in popular geographical perceptions, darkness continues to join wasteland and wide expanses of water as “types of primordial chaos.” Positive Understandings and Practices of Darkness Though negative conceptions of the dark continue to pervade contemporary ideas and condition social practices, nyctophobia is not culturally and historically universal, and it has not been shared by all people, not even during times of scarce illumination. Dominant negative depictions of darkness are supplemented by multivalent understandings. Koslofsky (2011, 5) identifies a range of conceptions, where darkness has symbolized “a diabolical night, nocturnal devotion, honest labour at night, and a night of drunken excess and indiscipline,” as well as being conducive to conviviality, intimacy, experimentation, and excitement. As Robert Williams (2008, 514) argues, urban darkness does not trigger essential human responses but is always mediated by human practices and values: “Night spaces are neither uniform nor homogenous. Rather they are constituted by social struggles about what should and should not happen in certain places during the dark of the night.” Accordingly, darkness is profoundly ambivalent and multiply contested. It has not only been construed as terrifying, fostering deviance and disorder, and antithetical to enlightenment and reason, but positively valued in many ways. A sense of the generative capacities of darkness can be considered by exploring alternative premodern nocturnal values. Bronfen (2008) depicts the Greek night goddess Nyx as an ambiguous divinity, associated with death and strife, but also with dreams and love. Veronica Della Dora identifies the appeal of the gloomy caves sought by early ascetic eastern Christians. Rather than offer the sensual plenitude and visual revelation of large vistas of the landscape that confirmed God’s work, the cave was a site of prayer and retreat in which the very lack of vision promoted apophatic religious intimations; it was beyond the capacity of humans to understand the divine or express it meaningfully. For these denizens, “Visual presence conceals spiritual absence; visual absence invites divine presence” (Della Dora 2011, 762). Similarly, Koslofsky (2011) draws attention to the growth of a

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mystical theology in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Europe that also promoted meditation within dark caves. Darkness inspired new forms of piety, metaphorically encapsulating the religious struggle toward the light and the path from earthly gloom to illuminated afterlife. Caves solicited a form of devotion in which darkness was valued as conducive to mystery, profundity, and beauty, and an acknowledgment of the ineffability and inexpressibility of God. More extensive use of darkness is used in Taoist meditation, where staying in a completely lightless room for short or prolonged periods is conducive to lucid dreaming and enhanced spirituality, as well as the supposedly beneficial effects of melatonin production. Such desires for complete gloom are not only motivated by religious and spiritual desires, for as Chet Raymo (2008) explains, in the bardic schools of ancient Ireland, young poets were sent to cells that contained only a bed and were enclosed in total darkness. An environment free of visual distractions, it was believed, offered the most fertile conditions in which to compose poetry. These sacred and meditative practices have been given renewed impetus by the rise of New Age religious beliefs (Heelas 1996). Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick discuss a performative, experiential event held during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche festival, in which people encountered a line of eleven suspended “witches’ cradles,” props formerly deployed to torture those accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages but subsequently reclaimed by occultists to stimulate altered states and mystical experiences. Audience members were hoisted in the cradles, supplied with earplugs and blindfolds, and suspended for fifteen minutes, during which they experienced tactile and olfactory impressions as well as falling into deep states of relaxation (Fisher and Drobnick 2012). Other contemporary New Age therapeutic treatments include full sensory deprivation in flotation tanks and versions of the Native American traditional sweat lodge ceremony, in which a ritualized cleansing of the mind, body, and spirit is provided by entering an environment of intense heat and throbbing drums. An overwhelming focus on one’s heartbeat is facilitated by the very dark interiors in which the ritual takes place, the circular or oval shape of the chamber representing both universe and womb, and the darkness symbolizing the time before birth or creation. Although I have discussed the terrors wrought by the onset of darkness in medieval domestic space, darkness also provided fertile settings for social and familial interaction. For in these times, night was not conceived as a single stretch but was typically marked by the regular rhythms of “sunset, shutting in, candle-­lighting, bed-­time, midnight, the dead of night, cock-­crow and dawn,” temporal phases that provided different experiences

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and engagements (Ekirch 2005, 138). More strikingly, before the advent of industrial work schedules and widespread illumination, sleep patterns were characterized by a first sleep—­which might begin after dark and after four hours or so cease during what we now refer to as the middle of the night—­followed by a second, shorter, lighter slumber. In between these two spells, an hour or two was spent in wakefulness in the dark, during which numerous activities could take place. For many, this was a welcome interlude from work and provided opportunities to share stories or converse, have sex, lie in thoughtful repose and reverie, or pray. These earlier social or solitary experiences away from mundane cares indicate how darkness might provide “a conduit for new forms of conviviality and camaraderie” (Gallan and Gibson 2011, 2514). In modern times, those who shun urban darkness contrast with those who seek out gloom. As William Sharpe (2008, 14) rather romantically notes, a “second city—­with its own geography and its own set of citizens” emerges when daylight fades. For despite hegemonic desires to bathe the city in light, positive evaluations of darkness have contested the march of illumination across urban space. I have already referred to the lantern smashing in opposition to an intensified policing of the night. Ever since, there has been continuous conflict between seekers of dark spaces and those who authoritatively aim to extend surveillance across the nocturnal city. A colonizing illumination has been resisted by “the traditional inhabitants of the night: servants, apprentices and students . . . tavern visitors, prostitutes” and workers and pleasure seekers among others who find succor, opportunity, excitement, and refuge in the dark (Koslofsky 2011, 278). Besides criminal activities, sedition, political opposition, illicit romances, subcultural practices, urban exploration, flyer posting, and graffiti writing typically take place under cover of darkness. Bryan Palmer (2000, 16–­17) conceives darkness to promote not only states of disconsolation and alienation but also transgression, as the occasion for “daylight’s dispossessed—­ the deviant, the dissident, the different” to emerge. Darkness thus provides opportunities for clandestine, revolutionary, and conspiratorial activities and fostering imaginative, creative challenges to daytime norms of commerce, economic rationality, and regulation. In the dark, persecuted minorities, marginal groups, and the lower classes may escape domineering masters, carve out time and space outside working time, achieve “freedom from both labour and social scrutiny,” and organize politically (Ekirch 2005, 227). Besides providing a cloak for the activities of Black Panthers, chartists, proletarian insurrectionists, and other opponents of political

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hegemony, darkness also provided the conditions for those subject to colonial brutalities to restore aspects of their identity and culture. For example, Galinier et al. (2010, 828) refer to the Mesoamericans and Andeans who escaped the violence of Spanish imperial power by confining “indigenous knowledge and practices to the hidden recesses of the night.” Similarly, Palmer (2000) mentions the African American slaves who forged a collectivity in the darkness. Night also remains the time when the demimonde of the city comes to life, as witches, prostitutes, bohemians, beatniks, drug dealers, revolutionaries, conspirators, and heretics come out to play, plot, and do business. Moreover, cultural settings offer late-­night, often gloomy settings for burlesque entertainment and for blues and jazz musicians, nurturing ideas that darkness is associated with libidinal desires, transgressive sexualities, and mystical practices, providing a realm in which “counters to   .  .  . conventional wisdom find a space to grow and growl” (454). The phantasmagorical nighttime city has been promoted in numerous cultural representations. The rise of a nocturnal sublime, a “realm of fascination and fear which inhabits the edges of our existence, crowded by shadows, plagued by uncertainty, and shrouded in intrigue,” has romanticized the urban night (Sharpe 2008, 9). It has become a time of libidinal charge and transgression, replete with “sensualities and sociabilities, aesthetics and the art of resistance,” a “dark moment of human estrangement” yet filled with alluring thrills and adventures (Palmer 2000, 394). Darkness retains this potency, offering an occasion “for trying to be someone the daytime may not let you be, a time for meeting people you should not, for doing things your parents told you not to do” (van Liempt et al. 2015, 408). For instance, the dark streets of London have forever constituted a realm into which nightwalkers plunge in order to experience various kinds of thrilling alterity. Matthew Beaumont (2015) depicts the allure of striding out into the capital’s darkness for a cast of writers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, walkers who made their way through the nocturnal labyrinth before and after the advent of gaslight. Charting picaresque adventures, fabulating on what was obscure, wallowing in darkness’s aesthetic charge, portraying a “Victorian noir,” or expending pent-­up energies, Beaumont discusses accounts of the London night from writers including John Clare, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. In the twentieth century, Sharpe (2008, 7) describes how representations of New York City after dark variously suggest “a snare, a canvas, a foreign

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land, a fantasy, a stage.” He highlights the contributions of key artists and photographers, including the images of lurid accidents and alienation captured by Weegee, and the paintings of Edward Hopper. The fantastic urban like, unsettling chiaroscuro of film noir specifically conjures up dream-­ dimensions that feature flawed characters and chaotic lives, despair and decadence, danger and erotic suggestion. Weird camera angles, smoke and rain, reflections, shafts of disorientating light, and pools of darkness capture the femme fatales, corrupt officials, gangsters, and hard-­bitten, jaded heroes in the midst of a mire of greed, lust, and corruption. According to Palmer (2000, 392), film noir captures “the distorted shadows of night’s always unfulfilled dreams, sliding inevitably into the sinister hole of nightmarish fears” in a nocturnal, gothic Babylon. Significantly, in this sensual and aesthetic reconfiguring of the night, darkness is complementary to light, a sensual (dis)ordering and revaluing that contrasts with the rationalizing and moral bourgeois order imposed by illumination. This exemplifies the ambiva­ lence that continuously surrounds darkness and the complex relational dynamics between light and dark. Besides the appeal of urban darkness to bohemian, illicit, and libidinous practices and the captivating representations so pervasive in particular forms of cinema, graphic fiction, advertisements, painting, and photography, other sites in which to experience darkness emerged in the modern city. At an intimate level, darkrooms provided a small space for focused concentration in which photographers could pore over chemical solutions to scrutinize the appearance of images appearing in trays. As illumination increasingly colonized areas of the nineteenth century, contrasting areas of darkness, formerly conceived as inimical to pleasure, became associated with new desires and pleasures. In Paris, for artists and writers, dark alleys and streets came to possess an otherness, a mystery at variance to the lit world (Bressani 2015). During the great infrastructural developments of nineteenth-­century London, new dark realms became sites of fascination, places of danger and desire, notably the tunnels, cellars, and sewers that fueled the imaginations of Victorian novelists. Such fantasies resonate with contemporary cinematic portrayals of subterranean gloom and the aesthetics of film noir. These include the atmospheric settings of the Viennese sewers in the Third Man, the London underground in Quatermass and the Pit and Deathline, and the gloomy environment of the New York’s subway system in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) (Brunsdon 2006). Such representations include documentation of those reputed to be dwelling underground in the latter realm (Pike 1998).

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In addition, the conversion of the theater, and subsequently the cinema, into a darkened auditorium in which attention was focused on the illuminated stage or luminous film also created new spaces of intimacy and fantasy. Indeed, as Noam Elcott (2012, 74) asserts, darkness was “written into cinema operating manuals” and continues to pervade movie theaters, intensifying the audience’s absorption in the shifting patterns of light on-­screen. Darkness was also an integral part of the appeal of other attractions. Alice Barnaby (2009) focuses on London’s eighteenth-­century pleasure grounds, Vauxhall Gardens, where illuminated spectacles that included varied lamps, transparent paintings, mirrors, fireworks, and dio­ ramas were supplemented by dark attractions. The Hermit’s Grotto, Submarine Caves, and Dark Walk produced a recreational space in which visitors could experience depths of light and darkness. Some visitors regarded these spaces as encouraging deviance and impropriety, while others found them exciting, exemplifying the contested cultural values that surround darkness. The Hermit’s Grotto and Submarine Caves adopted from the archetypal eighteenth-­century picturesque landscape designs of aristocratic estates offered a romantic, mysterious, and fantastic realm in which a tactile encounter with darkness encouraged excitable social interaction. At the Dark Walk, lower levels of light heightened imagination and fostered more relaxed, spontaneous ways of moving, but also offered opportunities for pickpocketing, sexual activity, and violence, provoking divergent opinions. The debate concluded with the demise of the Dark Walk through more extensive illumination, but its disappearance was lamented by many. In contemporary times, the libidinal potential of darkness has reemerged in the dark rooms of gay subculture, offering a space in which men may seek out anonymous sexual intimacy. Early modern fairgrounds used new technologies that facilitated rapid mechanized transit and greater control of illumination, and also deployed darkness to accentuate carnival thrills. Tunnels of love, in which riders were taken by two-­passenger boats through dark passages in fabricated environments featured two major themes: a relaxing romantic ride encouraging intimate contact between couples or a spooky horror ride that inspired the pair to cling to each other, permitting a close physical contact that would otherwise be subject to social disapproval. Blackpool Pleasure Beach installed the still-­extant River Caves in 1910, with shifts in direction and surprise views appearing out of the darkness. The Pleasure Beach is also home to the world’s first Ghost Train, an attraction that similarly depends on passage through a turning, twisting dark route, with

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key features including unseen whistles and hooters, air blowers, cobwebs brushing the face, opening coffins, springing ghouls, and optical illusions. This feast of carnivalesque gothic is described by Fred Botting (1996, 3) as an “overabundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason.” These gothic thrills also pervaded the popular spiritualist séances held in the lightless parlors of Victorian England, where mediums endeavored to contact the deceased by acting as a channel for its spirit through the occult means of joining hands around a table to create a “spiritual circle.” Darkness, it was contended, served as the most auspicious conditions in which spirit would appear, though skeptics point out that this also enabled sleight of hand and fraudulent maneuvers such as producing ectoplasm and other signs of supernatural presence that fooled gullible participants. Darkness is also experienced during contemporary ghost tours and hunts, an increasingly popular tourist activity across cities in the UK and the United States. Julian Holloway (2010, 630) details an organized ghost hunt in Salford’s venerable Ordsall Hall at the point that the lights were dimmed. He comments on how he and others were “filled by a sense of unease as the layout and dimensions of rooms, doorways, objects, and artefacts lose their recently gained familiarity” and doors opened into “spaces of fascination, spaces without inhabitation, spaces filled with the potential for mysterious shapes, outlines, and noises.” This restricted sight provoked a listening “more highly attuned to knocks, taps, breathing, and other noises.” The condition of darkness fosters the willful suspension of belief integral to the playful quest for intimations of the mysterious and ineffable. The fantastical was also provoked by colonial encounters with darkness. Julian Baker (2015) focuses on the nineteenth-­century historical context of British travelers in India and how they moved through the night to avoid the heat of the day. Imbued with intimations of the exotic, the orientalist, and the tropical, these aesthetic sensibilities conditioned the phantasmagorical imagination with which these colonial travelers encountered nocturnal landscapes. By the light of campfires, murky scenes incorporated elephants and bullocks, singing Indian servants, and fantastic shadowy elements enclosed by the gloom beyond, intensifying orientalist associations. Famously celebrating the subtleties of gloom, Junichiro Tanizaki’s evoca­ tive In Praise of Shadows offers a powerful counteraesthetic to the growing spread of illuminated brightness across Japan. Tanizaki conceives illumination as a Western import that was diminishing the subtleties of Japanese sensibilities, overwhelming traditional aesthetics of place, person, and temporality. He provides an exquisite depiction of the appearance of

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Japanese lacquerware in a darkened room where its “florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested,” as the sheen of the lacquer “reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the draughts that found their way into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie.” In the evening, he continues, “the thin impalpable, faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.” He further admires the effects of candlelight in big darkened rooms, and the dark depths of alcoves and recesses, so that the beauty of a Japanese room, he asserts, “depends upon a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows,” in contradistinction to the overornamentation and garish lighting of Western interior decor (Tanizaki 2001, 24–­29). Blackout The section above captures the diverse pleasures associated with darkness and the different aesthetics, desires, and imaginaries that it provokes. I have sought to emphasize the continuities of these pleasures as well as the historical contexts within which they have emerged. These positive meanings and experiences supplement the negative qualities attributed to gloom and draw out its profound ambiguity. While darkness in these cases is designed or pursued, potential social and aesthetic pleasures and perils are not necessarily planned but may be experienced when we are suddenly plunged into darkness. The shifting affective, sensual, and social experience of darkness, its rich ambiguities, and the ways in which responses to it are invariably contextual are exemplified during urban blackouts. As David  Nye (2010, 14) suggests, until recent times, “darkness and light alternated in a rhythm that varied with the seasons, and that imposed a structure and limits on existence,” a repetitive pattern imposed on households, public spaces, and workplaces that created habitual expectations that when darkness fell, certain activities would cease and others begin. The establishment of electric illumination has initiated new habitual understandings about what can be practiced, perceived, and felt across the diurnal cycle, contemporary rhythms that blackouts disrupt. Although superseded by the development of military technologies able to perceive the city after dark, blackouts became familiar during the first half of the twentieth century during wartime, providing a strategic invisi­ bility by erasing the electrified landscape, redefining urban space by “hiding landmarks and disrupting familiar visual patterns” (40). Throughout

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World War II in London, the absence of light during nightly blackouts was synonymous with long-­lasting wartime deprivation and abnormality, and the celebrations marking the war’s end, significantly including the floodlighting of nationally iconic buildings, symbolically commemorated national survival and stoicism. These illuminations were euphorically received by the emotive VE Day crowds (Sumartojo 2014). Yet the blackout had become a way of life for many inhabitants, and while it offered opportunities for thieves and looters, it was also integral to a collective intimacy. Consequently, Nye reports, many “felt exposed in a room without blackout curtains drawn” (2010, 57). As Nye remarks, the interlinked electric grid is a major sociotechnical achievement, yet its very complexity increases the risk of a failure across the system, as unexpected events and mistakes can have extensive consequences: “Apparently insignificant flaws and inconsistencies accumulate until an unforeseeable combination of circumstances can trigger a failure” (32). Accordingly, extensive urban blackouts caused by technical failings and unforeseen climatic and environmental conditions have become frequent (Bennett 2005). On these occasions, Nye (2010, 33) claims, “the social construction of reality breaks down too,” promoting improvisation in the use of public space as well as the reordering of rhythmic and temporal urban experience. Yet responses to successive blackouts in New York City have been influenced by the fears, desires, constraints, and opportunities that circulate during the times at which they occur. During the 1965 blackout in New York City, large numbers of residents and workers poured onto the street, and convivial conversation replaced instrumental exchange and suspicion, as the flow of consumption and production was disrupted. Social barriers dissolved and inhibitions weakened under the shared conditions of darkness, as an awareness of social interdependence dawned. Similar conditions of conviviality are recalled by many Britons, who nostalgically refer to the rekindling of the bonds between family and friends. Huddled round the glow of candlelight during the government-­enforced blackouts of the 1970s, imposed in response to the reduced supply of coal during an extensive miners’ strike, Britons played games, conversed, and shared memories. This changed context produced a liminal state in which the usual conditions and codes were suspended, places were subject to different uses, and people entered what Nye describes as “a state of suspended animation, which sharpens their perceptions of their immediate environment . . . the city is quieter and sounds unfamiliar” (83). On this occasion, darkness provoked a festive mood of excitement.

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This celebratory mood wholly contrasted with the blackout of 1977. As New York City slumped under conditions of inflation, unemployment, social conflicts compounded by overzealous policing, and widespread mistrust between inhabitants, the blackout became emblematic of social and economic discord. And this was further symbolized by the rioters, looters, and arsonists who capitalized on the conditions afforded by darkness, confirming widespread understanding that the blackout signaled social breakdown and a potentially dystopian future, “a harbinger of terror, crime and chaos” (203). The persistent association of darkness with danger and insecurity surges at particular times, as these fearful responses to the 1977 blackout exemplify. However, as Jelle Brands and Tim Schwanen (2014) assert, feelings and assessments of nighttime safety are complex, adaptive, and situational. More recently, blackouts have provoked imaginaries stoked by fears of terrorist threat. The 2003 New York City blackout once more devolved into conviviality and carnival once fears about potential terrorist causes had been assuaged. Chris Yuill (2004) identified “a heightened sense of being” and the surfacing of calm, generosity and friendliness as part of a “collective effervescence” that responds to the special conditions of darkness. Nye (2010, 229) details how “a symphony of insect sounds was suddenly audible,” with the unfamiliar sounds of crickets and cicadas highlighting how sensual apprehension may be altered in pervasive darkness. Visually, too, Jane Brox (2010, 243) observes how the New York environment was reenchanted, as “skyscrapers take on a geological sheen and the stars resemble those of ancient times.” The examples of blackouts highlight how darkness is not essentially neutral, positive, or negative; its power depends on the temporal and spatial contexts in which it is experienced. It is evident that its aesthetic, sensory, affective, social, and political potentialities can enable a diverse range of identities and activities. Darkness facilitates thrilling embodied experiences, provokes imaginations, arouses gothic fantasies, encourages meditative and religious experiences, inspires artistic expressions, provides forms of refuge, and fosters modes of social engagement. It may also be productive of danger, fear, oppression, and exclusion, and signify abjection and backwardness. The Yearning for Darkness In recent years, the dearth of darkness—­and the perceived overillumination of space—­has inspired a search for gloom. Such reattachments have inspired a revaluing of the qualities of darkness. Religious emphases on

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devilry and sin, Enlightenment assumptions about ignorance and primitiveness, and pragmatic assertions about the dangers posed by gloom are being challenged and supplanted by associations that are more positive. Concerns about the disappearance of darkness are not new, and as emphasized above, numerous groups have resisted nocturnalization, including lantern smashers, assorted political activists, criminals, bohemians, Christian ascetics, and various mystics and New Agers. The advent of pervasive illumination and the aesthetic transformation this has wrought have also concerned medics and psychologists, as Ernest Freeberg exemplifies, discussing how the early American psychologist G. Stanley Hall worried about the demise of experiencing twilight in an age of electricity. He submitted that with their “rich colours and long shadows, the hours of dusk nurtured something poetic and spiritual in the human psyche, a contemplative mode of existence that looked beyond the material world exposed by the strong light of day” (quoted in Freeberg 2013, 294). At present, because of extensive illumination, the loss of darkness is increasingly lamented. Attlee (2011, 3, 9) considers that globally, only “the great deserts and oceans offer large areas of darkness,” with most of us “condemned to simmer in our own electric bouillabaisse.” According to Nye (2010, 9), opportunities to perceive the night sky and see in the dark are curtailed, since most people “know only an artificial darkness that is fogged with electric light,” with the sky “a smudged and meaningless background.” While the massive expenditure of energy deployed to keep cities illuminated throughout the night provides one point of contention, the emergent dissatisfaction with overillumination extends to wider concerns about its impact on nonhumans. The rhythms of bird and insect migration are disturbed, fireflies cannot transmit their signals, and though moths are drawn to light, excessive illumination banishes them to darker realms. As I write, the state of New York is planning to switch off nonessential lights in state-­run buildings during peak migration seasons to assist the navigation of birds that become disoriented by electric lights, causing “fatal light attraction,” whereby they crash into buildings, dying in the millions each year. Using moonlight for orientation, migrating sea turtles and beetles are similarly confused. The progress of salamanders toward ponds in order to mate is unsettled, and the milk production of cows is interrupted (Rich and Longcore 2006). A key agent in the gradual process through which darkness has been revalued has been the International Dark Sky Association, an organization with a global reach in campaigning against the spread of light pollution and

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for a reduction in the wasteful use of lighting, and above all, in promoting the incidence of star-­filled skies untainted by skyglow. An expanding number of designated places diverge between International Dark Sky Communities, Parks, and Reserves. There are currently ten communities, eight in the United States, that implement stringent lighting codes, deliver educational programs, and develop citizen support for dark skies. Twenty-­two dark sky parks, defined as “a park or other public land possessing exceptional starry skies and natural nocturnal habitat where light pollution is mitigated and natural darkness is valuable as an important educational, cultural, scenic, and natural resource,” are mainly found in the United States, with five in Europe. In the next chapter, I investigate the sensory, social, and aesthetic experience of walking through one of these parks at night. With a more global reach, the nine dark sky reserves are more extensive areas that possess what is defined as “exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights” as well as a nocturnal environment “specifically protected for its scientific, natural, educational, cultural, heritage and/or public enjoyment.” They consist of a core area as well as a peripheral area that supports dark sky values (International Dark Sky Association n.d.). Diverse impulses and desires are converging to assert the value of the nocturnal sky, including the aforementioned concern to attract celestial tourists (Weaver 2011). Terrel Gallaway (2015, 280) summarizes the diverse values of the night sky as a “source of aesthetic, scientific and spiritual inspiration . . . a natural resource, a scenic asset and part of humanity’s cultural heritage.” It also signifies more ecologically sustainable environments (Sutton and Elvidge 2015). Josianne Meier (2015) shows how a coalition of interests has aligned in the campaign to designate dark sky parks in Canada, the United States, and Germany, where groups of astrono­ mers, environmentalists, and heritage preservationists articulate divergent priorities and values but are in harmonious agreement about the significance of darkness and the desirability of designation. Oliver Dunnett (2014, 2) adopts a different perspective in examining the ideologies that prevail among proponents of the British dark sky movement. The astronomers in the vanguard of the movement suggest that access to the celestial vistas should be a right, articulating an idealized “astronomical sublime,” transcendent in its enormous scale and pushing at the boundaries of comprehending humanity’s location in a vast cosmos. Yet he also contends that light pollution is spatially conceived—­“light that ‘belongs’ in one place is seen  .  .  . as ‘out of place.’ ” Dunnett contends that such an outlook produces a distinctly moral geography in which the long-­standing opposition

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between an “artificial” and malign city, and a “natural,” “traditional” rural is amplified. The city, it is inferred, spawns “unnatural” effects and is the locus of pollution, reinforcing conservative national landscape ideologies in which “the rural as the English national heartland” is “infected” by urban illumination (10). Previously dominant ideas that articulated distinctions between light and dark are inverted by these equally binary oppositions, with a sublime rural darkness standing in opposition to the “uncivilized,” excessive illumination of the city. Such claims also extend to notions that the city, too, should possess skies full of stars, signifying a more sustainable, aesthetic relationship to “nature.” Such ideals are manifest during the annual Earth Hour, an event devised to draw attention to global warming, during which all “nonessential” lights, including the striking illuminations installed at iconic urban spaces, are turned off for one hour, providing a brief sense of how the city might appear if electric lighting was not so pervasive. Evidently, new ethics and aesthetics are emerging to challenge excessive illumination and celebrate darkness. However, rather than reinforce dualistic conceptions of light and dark, it is more profitable to reconsider the vexed relationship between them. Reconfiguring the Relationship between Light and Dark Darkness is suffused with numerous understandings that contest its value and is a condition under which very diverse practices take place. To essentialize darkness as a positive or negative condition is wholly inapposite, for it is inextricable from the cultural, geographical, and historical contexts within which these uses and meanings play out. Crucially, darkness is also conditioned by its fluid relationship with light, whether natural or artificial. As Nina Morris insists, the efficacy of both light and dark cannot lie in the triumph of light over dark but in the instability between them, in the ways in which they are both present in each other and condition the reception of each other. Because “perception shuttles between extremes of light and dark,” she argues, darkness is “situated, partial and relational” (Morris 2011, 316). For instance, the glamour of the bright lights of the big city depends on the dark amid which they shine, and on the contrastingly darker realms outside urban space. As Teresa Alves (2007, 1254) asserts, darkness “reaffirms the symbolic power underlying the use of light,” and accordingly, “light only puts on a show if it breaks out of darkness”; thus “the contrast between light and shadow needs to be redressed.” As light designers know well, illumination is most alluring and effective when placed against a dark background. For example, those illuminations

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at Blackpool that have the dark sea as their backdrop are more potent than those ensnared within the shine of the numerous forms of lighting on the other side of the road. Ben Gallan and Chris Gibson (2011) critique the still-­prevalent dualisms between dark and light, binary conceptions that suggest absolute opposition, diminish the diversity of each condition, and overlook how they interpenetrate each other. Moreover, they argue, the peddling of normative dualisms can facilitate authoritarian practices of control through establishing curfews, intensifying surveillance, and promoting particular religious, commercial, and moral values. Such essentialisms are further undermined by the actual cultural diversity in practicing and understanding day and night, where both intersect with such a multiplicity of other circadian, biological, climatic, and social rhythms (including heterogeneous sleep rhythms), as well as those of longer duration, that they lose distinction (Gallan 2014). Moreover, divergent local and national rhythms that characterize very different engagements with day and night still vary enormously (Edensor 2006, 2010). For instance, many inhabitants of Mediterranean and North African cities flood the streets after nightfall, enjoying strolling, dining, and drinking in crepuscular conditions, perhaps after taking a siesta during the hottest and brightest time of the day, whereas northern Europeans are less likely to swarm onto the streets in the evening or sleep during the early afternoon. Moreover, as discussed above, darkness and illumination are loaded with contested values. What may be a quiet, affective site of gloom for some may be a realm of terror and suspicion for others; what city planners and shopkeepers might experience as a brightly illuminated scene promoting commerce and conviviality may be conceived by marginal groups as a harsh realm of surveillance and exclusion; an apparent scene of safety and cheeriness might for astronomers testify to the dilution or disappearance of the nocturnal sky. The miscellaneous gloomy settings I have discussed indicate the sheer diversity of darkness, engendering an appreciation of the subtle varieties in the mix of dark and light found during twilight, crepuscular hours, moonlit nights, and the middle of the night, and within interiors that range from shadowy to pitch black. A recognition of this infinitely varied intermingling of darkness and light can perhaps instigate an appreciation of the qualities of gloom that were appreciated by those who dwelt in a time of sparse illumination, with their knowledge of stars and moon. For instance, the three stages of twilight—­civil, nautical, and astronomical—­occur in

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turn during both morning and evening, but currently these are terms that have largely disappeared. The geographical diversity of darkness becomes apparent for those habituated to the extensive urban illumination of western Europe when they travel to cities in which there is a different mix of illumination, darkness, and shadow. In many areas of urban India after sundown, illumination is far less bright than in most European cities, yet the streets are full of people, undeterred by this gloomier environment. In such unfamiliar settings, intensified awareness of sensory experience emerges. Sound takes on different qualities of timbre, resonance, and sharpness, with the clamor of chatter, recorded music, and the cries of traders punctuating the gloom, as do powerful, unaccustomed smells such as rotting vegetables, sewage, incense, and cooking. Moreover, while it may seem that the ability to walk seamlessly through brightly illuminated streets is an indisputable blessing, the need to pick a path carefully through the relative gloom might alternatively be conceived as enlivening the body, sharpening the senses and making one aware of others, and soliciting a heightened, tactile sense of mobility. These sensual and affective affordances remind us that the normative glare of Western streets is historically contextual and far from universal. Moreover, the different levels of light and dark, the nonvisual sensations, and the distinctive mix of social activities mean that in this gloomier setting, the atmosphere waxes and wanes with different intensities, contrasting with the more ordered ambiences of more brightly lit realms. The atmospheric and sensual potency of light under conditions in which it is accompanied by contiguous dimness resonates with Joachim Schlör’s (1998, 63) depiction of the nineteenth-­century Parisian boule­ vard as a channel of self-­contained space, separated “like an island of light against the surrounding darkness.” Persistent, excessive illumination loses its power if there is no darkness from which it can be distinguished. To conclude, I draw on three very different examples in which an imaginative, engaged, and creative use of light in the midst of gloom is produced, in which the potency of illumination is charged by its scarcity and darkness is welcomed. First, I discuss the campaign to advocate “dark design,” an approach that foregrounds the multiple ways in which darkness, as well as light, might be deployed in the design of interior and exterior spaces. This objective has been recently taken up by a group of some four hundred light designers who call for the more sustained deployment of what they term the “Dark Art.” Reclaiming gloom as a positive quality, they declare, “Let

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there be darkness.” They critique what they regard as overestimations among designers and engineers of quantitative measurements that deline­ ate the “perceived adequacy of Illumination” in spaces and argue for a reduction in visual information overload. Influenced by architects such as Louis Kahn, Juhu Pallasmaa, and Tadao Ando, they promote the aesthetic qualities of depth, mystery, introspection, imagination, chiaroscuro, variation, adaptability, theatricality, and atmosphere (Lowe and Raphael 2011; Lowe et al. 2013). In 2014 Subluminal, an event devised by a group of light designers in Manchester’s Victorian, neo-­Gothic John Rylands Library, was staged to bring out these potentialities. Their aim: to transform the usual sensory apprehension of the building. Visitors made their way through the library’s interior, where various light effects highlighted architectural features, sculptures, artifacts, stairways, and passages. At certain points, the gloom inside contrasted with the streetlights outside that shone through the ornamental windows. Attention was directed to shadowy entrances, dim areas of the ornate ceiling, and opaque niches. The illuminated features added to a space of rich contrasts in which previously overlooked details were complemented by mysterious, obscure realms. Second, I focus on a different way to design with darkness, that used by the Canadian off-­gridders investigated by Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart, who adopt sustainable and ecocentric space-­making practices and domestic routines informed by values that explicitly articulate a subtle engagement with light and darkness. These off-­gridders negotiate with darkness in a way that those connected to the grid need never consider. On dull days, the batteries they use to collect the power provided by photo­ voltaic panels will generate only a modicum of electricity that must be rationed to service the most pressing needs of the household. These homes “function in greater synchrony with the textures of darkness,” with inhabi­ tants adapting routines and technologies in accordance with the shifting availability of light that depends on season and weather (Vannini and Taggart 2015, 3). Thus off-­gridders must plan ahead, taking “darkness into account as both a continuous and repetitive event as well as an indefinite and less foreseeable occurrence” (9), an ongoing preparedness that ensures that at least some light is available, for they do not wish to dwell in medieval levels of darkness. Yet an appreciation of darkness accords with the slow, everyday rhythms that synchronize with the varying supply of sunlight and gloom. For those connected to the grid, such lighting practices might seem inconvenient and tiresome. Yet according to Vannini and Taggart (2013), for off-­gridders “visual comfort” is reconfigured “by

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taking delight in one’s capacity to affect one’s immediate environment by way of active participation . . . in one’s relative independence from others, and in one’s capacity to need and want less.” Here darkness is conceived as a positive condition, lived with and adapted to, perhaps signaling a future in which many more citizens will more actively respond to dark and light, conceive electric illumination as variable, and regard lower levels of light with familiarity. Finally, I look at the how the creative interplay between light and dark is integral to the work of the Scottish arts group NVA, whose members are adept at staging large-­scale, immersive events in nocturnal landscapes that challenge and augment visitors’ perceptions. Nina Morris describes NVA’s 2005 event, The Storr: Unfolding Landscape, organized across a spectacular mountainside on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The work required visitors to move up and across the hillside after dark with minimum illumination, confronting a series of happenings and installations that aimed to deepen their understanding of the landscape. Participants walked through woods and rugged slopes in varying weather conditions, witnessed pale projections of moving figures, heard recorded sounds, poetry, and music, and at the climax of the uphill section, confronted an array of illuminated rocky ridges. Such experiences accentuated certain sensory attunements and regularly shifted attention from absorption in what was nearby to looking outward or becoming immersed in sound. Morris (2011, 335) considers that the event shows the dark to be a richly “textured realm of sensory perception” that reconfigures relationships to the self, to others, and to space. NVA subsequently produced Speed of Light, an event involving runners and walkers that spread across Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood Park, the extinct volcanic landscape that dominates the eastern flanks of Edinburgh, and took place on each of nineteen nights in August 2012 as part of the city’s International Festival (Edensor and Lorimer 2015). The event was shaped by the ways in which participants experienced darkness and light and by the moving traces of light that they produced. Two groups of some 150 volunteer runners, clad in light suits, enacted changing choreographies in distinct areas of the park, while five groups of fifty walkers equipped with a staff that emitted a soft glow departed from the base camp at fifteen-­minute intervals to follow a two-­mile route. The evenly spaced runners produced a medley of visual effects as they jogged across dark hillsides and plateaus, forming shapes, clusters, or linear strings, animating the landscape and charting its contours and undulations. From a distance, they conjured up allusions to fireflies, fireworks, or participants in occult rituals. The walk-

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ers also etched temporary designs across space, their staffs merging into a glowing, white line of moving light, their bodies invisible, summoning up resonances with medieval pilgrims or marching warriors. The efficacy of the event was undergirded by the particular darkness of much of the park, with valleys and hillsides that shut out urban glow and enabled the vibrant formations of moving light to stand out. For the walkers, this gloom was also dramatically contrasted with the glittering city that girdled the park, visible when they reached the higher slopes. The interplay of light and darkness in an unusual urban expanse of blackness generated an intense engagement with place. In the next chapter I discuss the experience of running and walking in the dark during this event in greater detail. These events echo the touristic son et lumière shows, typically presented in ruins, stately homes, castles, cathedrals, and other places of historical significance, but now somewhat outdated. Initiated in the 1950s at the Château de Chambord on the Cosson River, France, these stagings have taken place at Egypt’s Great Pyramids, Rome’s Forum, the Parthenon in Athens, Indian forts and palaces, and numerous other iconic sites. Layers of lighting pick out particular buildings and architectural features across expansive landscapes, with music and narration providing further dramatic elements. Larger-­scale art events such as Speed of Light deploy light and darkness to theatricalize landscapes in new ways. Conclusion The evolving historical relationship of light to dark has frequently been teleologically conceived as an inevitable process of technological advancement and social and moral improvement, perhaps as part of the “civilizing process” (Elias 1982). In this chapter, I have unsettled such accounts by citing historical and contemporary examples. I have emphasized that the experience and practice of darkness have always been uneven, contested, and ambiguous. Yet it is apparent that in recent times, darkness is being sought with renewed vigor, its multiple pleasures increasingly recognized, revalued, and celebrated (Bogard 2008). The examples discussed above highlight how the relationship of light and dark is being reconfigured in ways that do not diminish darkness as a subordinate, inferior condition.

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Chapter 8

The Reenchantment of Darkness: The Pleasures of Noir

I n t h e p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r , I focused on the numerous values that have circulated around darkness, showing how negative conceptions that emerge out of religious and modernist thought have always been accompanied by positive understandings about the promises that darkness offers. These different ideas have informed a host of practices through which darkness offers pleasure and transgression, mystic and religious expectation, nocturnal sublimity, aesthetic delight, sensory immersion, social intimacy, and political opposition. Alternatively, darkness provokes fear at perilous conditions, supernatural forces, immorality, and malign human intent. Yet as I also emphasized, for many, the experience of darkness is now wholly unfamiliar because of the expansive colonization of the night by illumination, provoking new desires for dark encounters. I concluded by looking at three examples of alternative practice that positively reconfigure the relation­ship between light and dark. In this chapter, to further investigate the diverse contexts in which dark space is encountered, to gain a more substantive understanding of what it enables and delimits under particular conditions, and to explore why it is increasingly being sought, I provide accounts of different sites of darkness. The first section elaborates on a walk-­through in a dark sky park. This complements the discussion in chapter 1 about perceiving landscape with light and addresses the dearth of nocturnal accounts of landscape. This is followed by a consideration of how dark landscapes have been experienced via other mobile technologies, namely, by running, cycling, train, and car. I then investigate sites of total darkness, looking at a tourist attraction in which a simulated experience of New York is produced, a dark dining experience, a concert staged in the dark, and an artwork that relies on how the senses adapt to gloom. 189

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Encountering Gloomy Landscape: Galloway Dark Sky Park To explore how landscape might be perceived under nocturnal conditions in the absence of artificial light, I focus on a visit to Glen Trool in the UK’s first dark sky park, the three-­hundred-­square-­mile Galloway forest, containing the darkest skies in Europe, which rates a three (out of nine) on the Bortle scale (which measures night sky darkness based on the observability of astronomical objects). The park, awarded dark sky status by the International Dark Sky Association in 2009, lies in southwest Scotland. With few human inhabitants, it is characterized by swathes of commercial forestry, mountain, and moorland. To maintain gloom, measures to reduce  skyglow, light trespass, and glare include the shading of all light installations, lighting curfews, and strategic tree planting. First, I consider the enaction and experience of vision under gloomy, but not completely dark conditions, as I walked through Glen Trool, with its river, lake, and afforested slopes. It was a clear September night with no cloud cover and a thin crescent moon that later disappeared from the sky. At first, given the scarcity of available visual information cast by celestial light on the landscape’s earthly elements, vision was drawn toward the sky. By daylight, foreground and background coexist in the field of vision, and the eye continuously shifts between them, but under conditions of darkness, like fog, we are left to “to ponder our conditional engagements with the near and far” (Martin 2011, 455). By daylight, the depth of the landscape is registered by a succession of scenes that fade into the distance. In the dark, the horizon more emphatically marks the boundary between earth and sky, enclosing what seems to be a dark, largely undifferentiated realm that abruptly opens onto the luminous night sky. The night sky changes with the variable patterns of stars and the changing levels of light bestowed by the falling and rising sun, and on other evenings this dynamism would be characterized by variations in cloud cover, the shifting clarity of the atmosphere, and the phases of the moon. However, the evening of my visit to Glen Trool was ideal for stargazing. The infinite, dispassionate play of innumerable stars, distant galaxies, and constellations replaced the skyglow and murk that typifies many other British skies. Though in chapter 1 I discuss how the sky is often somewhat disconnected to conceptions of the landscape, under these conditions it thoroughly dominates perception, presenting an intricate array of countless features. Yet though the effervescent sky at first contrasted with the shadowy land, as vision adjusted to the gloom, more aspects of the land were made available to sight. While the cone cells in the eye function to adapt vision

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to normal levels of (day)light, allowing the experience of a color spectrum, rod cells operate when there are low levels of light. The rods allow human vision to gradually adjust to gloomier environments, usually after about twenty minutes, making the eyes more sensitive to light, shape, and movement, though impairing the ability to distinguish color. In the glen, an evening patchwork of shades of gray gave way to a more homogeneous, dark gathering of indistinguishable earthly elements that contrasted with the constant play of light in the sky above. This diminution means that colors can no longer tincture surrounding space, projecting their radiance outward. This day-­night distinction is captured by John Daniel’s (2008, 23) contention that daylight vision “catches on the surface of things, gets snagged and tugged about by their multiplicity,” whereas when looking at trees in a forest at night, the sensation is of their “commonality” and “not the names I knew them by but their essential namelessness.” This dense intertwining of earthly matter was disrupted only when a form suddenly became visible, usually the separate silhouette of a single pine or oak tree against the sky. Yet after some time, my eyes adjusted to the shifting availability of light, which was conditioned by the qualities of the surrounding features that blocked the sky’s glow or overshadowed the path, and the reflective qualities of particular elements. Gradually, a greater range of features and textures became apparent. Human vision generally scans the daylit landscape rather than focusing on specific things. Yet, in the darkness, small patches of reflected light or subtly different shades of gray can serve to focus vision more acutely than in the daylight with its multitude of competing sights. The eye seeks what can be perceived and then concentrates on the elements that show up against the black backdrop. Walking through Glen Trool, obscure glimmerings became faintly apparent, including wet rock surfaces, the silvery slivers of streams, and the smooth, white bark of silver birch trees, although darker shapes would also suddenly loom out of the dimness. To see with the dark landscape is to fail to perceive the complex configurations sensed with daylight and to miss numerous features, but to focus more exclusively on fewer elements. Moreover, where gloom thickens, the body’s boundaries become indistinct, merging with the surroundings to produce an expansive impression of the space beyond us as we become one with the darkness. Under such conditions, it is impossible to mobilize an omniscient gaze or activate expert scrutiny. A further dimension of vision in Glen Trool’s dark landscape was revealed when from seemingly far away, though how far was difficult to guess in the absence of other visual information, another visitor’s presence

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was revealed by a thin flashlight. In the absence of any other artificial illumination, this weak light signaled a presence far more acutely than would have been the case by daylight, when in all likelihood the visitor would not have been perceptible, covered by trees and absorbed in the detail of the landscape. Yet though this person was exposed by flashlight, there could have been others in the glen who were not using lights and were therefore imperceptible. This draws attention to John Wylie’s (2007, 152) claim that as seeing subjects, we are always imbued with a consciousness that we can always be seen as part of the “landscape of visible things,” that we are observable subjects as well as observers. Similarly, William Connolly discusses Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s (2011) insistence that our ability to perceive depth in the landscape is achieved through prior experience of space from multiple perspectives, an anticipatory disposition that also conjures up an awareness that we can also be seen from multiple perspectives—­in contemporary times, perhaps as an object of surveillance. However, these generali­zations are not pertinent in dark landscapes, where our presence may not be perceptible at all, perhaps triggering an awareness that we can hide or act as we wish in the absence of the constraining gaze of others, but also provoking anxieties that should an accident befall us, nobody may respond to our situation. Similarly, the undetectable presence of others may be both pleasing because we are able to ignore their presence or alarming, since we are unaware of what they might be up to. In addition to the visual experience of the vital dark world, critiques of accounts that privilege the visual also point to the nonvisual ways in which space is apprehended through hearing, smell, touch, and proprioception. These senses may temporarily supplant vision as the most dominant sense or become entangled with seeing. Indeed, more-­nuanced understandings of visual perception and the landscape have moved beyond a focus on the passive consumption of the objectified spectacle in accounting for the multi­ sensual entwinement of the gaze with sound and touch (Degen, DeSilvey, and Rose 2008). Crucially, these nonvisual senses rise to prominence when amid dark or gloomy space, as will be apparent in the different sensory experiences recounted throughout this chapter. Thus in addition to reconfiguring visual experience when apprehending dark landscapes, we draw more substantively on touch, smell, hearing, and proprioception. A host of sensations emerge, including a heightened awareness of temperature, the stillness or freshness of the air, a delicate array of sounds, and the shifting textures underfoot, as well as a conjectural and imaginative approach to space. This latter disposition is referred to by Rob-

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ert MacFarlane (2005, 75), who claims that in the dark “one becomes more aware of landscape as a medley of effects.” In this “mingling of geology, memory, nature, movement,” landforms “exist as presences: inferred, less substantial but more powerful for it.” He surmises how we might become aware that we walk “through the depths of time as well as physical space” (75) as human and geological history press on the walker, conjectural tendencies to which I return. In a different vein, John Tallmadge (2008, 140–­42) asserts that in daylight, the dominance of visual apprehension means that the “ubiquity and pervasiveness of light make everything stand out in hard-­edged clarity. We can read things at a distance and make our plans.” However, he contends that vision “allows us to know things only by their surfaces.” Tallmadge discusses how by daylight he is able to “fix a position, identify a person or animal moving across a slope, trace a route,” but by night, such practices take longer, and information must be gathered by hearing, touch, and smell, senses that require “more patience and intimacy than sight.” He poetically conveys how in becoming attuned to the landscape through these other senses, the body “relaxes, opens, breathes, extends its attention outward into the world the way a plant feels its way into the soil with roots or into the air with leaves.” In Glen Trool, this feeling out of space is exemplified by negotiating the path, which meandered, descending and ascending frequently. Because it could be visually recognized only a few feet ahead or not at all when under shadowy trees, the anticipation of what movements to make had to occur moment to moment. The body could not prepare for a vertiginous ascent or descent but had to operate in the here and now, inducing a heightened awareness of the balance and proprioceptive aptitude required. The uncertainty about the way ahead also prompted an interaction with my companion through which progress was monitored along this dark route: “This bit is steep!,” “What’s that there?,” “Careful, the path is over here,” “Look out, there may be a drop.” At such moments, as with the partially sighted and blind hillwalkers discussed by Hannah MacPherson (2009, 1048), “residual sight tended to be concentrated on navigation and safety. . . . walking became a practice more analogous to an adventure sport than a contemplative stroll.” As I emphasized earlier, when we enter a landscape we do not behold a passive, inert scene but are immersed in the currents and energies of a world-­in-­formation. Moreover, we are also integrally part of this landscape, as the light or lack of it is entwined with our sensing bodies, blurring distinctions between outside and inside. The heightening of other senses in

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the dark meant that disregarded vital elements in the landscape became prominent. This was especially the case with sound. Although the environment initially seemed rather silent, especially with the lack of wind, the ever-­changing sounds of flowing water that accompanied every step impinged on consciousness. What sounded like a distant waterfall formed an ever-­present background noise, changing in its tones as the volume of water seemed to alter and the sound arrived from different directions as the walk progressed. This was augmented by the bubbling of small cataracts and burns, which changed in intensity and pitch as they were approached and passed, and by occasional rustles in the undergrowth or the commotion created by the flight of birds from the trees in which they were roosting. Though I have discussed how a sense of depth was visually obliterated by the mass of darkness into which the landscape was absorbed, this depth was restored through sound, with these different levels of distant and nearby sounds. These sounds focused attention on the dynamism bestowed on the landscape by water and animals, and were supplemented by the much louder shrieks of a tawny owl that lasted for a short while before ceasing, leaving a profound sonic vacuum. The other evident sounds were made by our footsteps as they crunched along the gravelly path and the enunciations, breath, and movements of myself and my companion. In the darkness, the tactile senses also sharply registered. Feet quickly learned to identify the different textures underfoot, detecting where tree roots burst out of the ground to make the path uneven, or slippery, muddy sections. In addition, as the walk progressed, the shifting quality of the air indicated the different kinds of space that were encountered: on higher rises or in open ground, a mild breeze would assail the face, but when surrounded by overhanging trees or in dells, the air seemed still and damper. This air also conveyed intermittent smells, the pungent scents of pinesap, fungi, and carrion that momentarily captured attention. To conclude, the apprehension of this dark valley landscape was certainly constrained by an inability to see much, though vision was reconfigured and adapted to the surroundings, focusing on objects other than those available to perception in the daylight. This fostered the emergence of other sensations that provided access to the processes that ceaselessly reconstitute the far-­from-­ quiescent landscape. The ever-­changing breeze, the shrieking owl, the rustles in the grass, the scents of decay, the constant flows of water, and the inexorable play of the night sky brought home the landscape’s vitalism, signifying the countless energies and agencies that continuously coproduce

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the emergence of the world. Becoming enchanted by the vital rhythms of darkness does not only require an unmediated sensory engagement but can also involve technological means, as Victoria Mason and Paul Hope (2014) reveal in their discussion of the tracking tools deployed to study the movements of bats at night, which dispense forms of information that reveal the wild intensities of their swarming. Walking and Running through the Dark Landscape with Illumination Speed of Light Having focused on moving through a dark landscape in the absence of any artificial illumination—­with the exception of the distant flashlight emanating from an unseen person—­I now consider how the experience of darkness is conditioned by the mobilization of distinctive forms of lighting to facilitate movement through space. These deployments make darkness visible, providing a point of contrast with which the blackness beyond the light is dramatized and distinguished. First, I refer to an event discussed in the previous chapter, Speed of Light, staged in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park. I have mentioned the different lighting technologies harnessed to the moving bodies of walking and running participants, with runners clad in light-­suits and walkers equipped with a walking staff that emitted a soft-­toned luminescent glow from its base, and have identified the illuminated effects they produced in the dark landscape. I now focus on the sensory experience of running and moving across this hilly terrain in the dark. Hayden Lorimer details how running at night offers experiences that differ from those that involve moving through a daylit landscape. In cities, especially in the dark midwinter, he explains that “the runner’s world glows sodium orange; the signature colour of the modern, nocturnal city,” and this light is sufficient and consistent enough to “reveal surfaces underfoot: well-­laid, dependable paving slabs; smooth tarmac or the irregularities of cobblestones; back lanes pitted with potholes and puddles.” However, when these habits are replaced by jogging across a dark, hilly landscape with a headlamp and light suit, rhythms, maneuvers, and modes of attention are transformed, as Lorimer details: “Feelings of vulnerability are palpable, borne of not knowing with any real confidence what lies beneath or just ahead. Long strides shorten and stiffen to smaller steps.  .  .  . freer movements are pitched off balance by the ever-­present worry of putting a

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foot wrong.” The seamless, often unreflexive process of running through visible space is disrupted, as “feelings of fluency deteriorate into a clutter of physical uncertainty.” The headlamp bestowed some light, forming a well-­defined tunnel of visibility, but only facilitated limited knowledge of the surface, fostering what Lorimer refers to as “a state of hyper-­vigilance, exhibited in tiny, quick repeated head movements  .  .  . continuous tilts, twitches and turns (that) were a result of the ongoing exercise of monitoring the ground to be encountered just a few paces ahead.” This need to continuously improvise in response to the conditions felt and seen underfoot testifies to the greater peril induced through moving more swiftly (than walking) through dark landscape. Yet as Lorimer emphasizes, by running in the dark, “in these unfamiliar conditions the sense of discovery was more intense, one where the felt-­world is continually emerging into being” (quoted in Edensor and Lorimer 2015, 9). Walking in Speed of Light did not involve the unfolding experience of space at so quick a rhythm, yet in addition to nonvisual sensations akin to those experienced in Glen Trool, the peculiar deployment of light produced an unfamiliar visual confrontation with landscape. The illuminated tube at the base of the staff had the strange effect of lighting up boots and the surfaces underfoot. This personalized pool of light channeled attention toward the ground, rather than would usually be the case in this panoramic park, where focus would likely be directed toward the picturesque scenes in the middle and far distance. The light induced a preoccupation with the sculptural forms of rock strata, the textures of scree beds, and the forms and qualities of vegetation. At the time of the walk, in late summer, yellow ragwort grows abundant in Holyrood Park, by day forming blazing patches of vibrant color across the landscape. But at night, in the light cast by the staff’s glowing tube, it appeared in pale gray, but with textures and shape illuminated, standing apart from its surroundings in a way that could not be experienced during daylight. The mobile gaze is shaped by specific imperatives: in touristically appraising scenery, in marking progress during a sporting race, in applying professional scrutiny (Büscher 2006), or in bird-­watching (Hui 2013). As Peter Merriman (2009, 590) advances, “pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists . . . have very different embodied engagements with and experiences of inhabiting the spaces of streets and roads.” Different modes of moving through dark space use distinct technologies and provide multiple ways of performing and experiencing vision. More particularly, mecha-

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nized mobilities generate different encounters with darkness according to the forms of illumination deployed, speed, and the views afforded. Night Train For rail passengers, travel during the dark hours offers a reconfiguring of the landscape experienced from the train window by day. Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1980) describes how early train travel produced the experience of hurtling through space at speeds previously unimaginable, offering a novel, panoramic, mobile visual experience framed by the window that utterly transformed humanity’s relationship with landscape. David Bissell (2009) augments this account by foregrounding passengers’ visual experience according to their motivations, the regularity of the travel, and the stages of the journey. Additional factors include the behavior and presence of other passengers, time and season, the kind of train, interior design, and the kinds of landscape passed. Bissell also emphasizes the multisensory qualities of train travel and the imbrication of the visual with other senses. Vision is conditioned by the available light. For instance, an attentive gaze that seeks out landmarks, patterns of agriculture, and points that waymark the journey is easily mobilized in daylight. Traveling in the dark thwarts this scanning of the landscape’s depths and the marking of progress. Moreover, Bissell (2009, 52) notes that at night, “outside the sodiumscape of urban areas, the attenuation of visual phenomena framed by the window focuses the visual gaze towards the interior of the carriage.” Indeed, in the absence of luminous scenes outside, the reflective window may persuade passengers to gaze inward toward the illuminated carriage in which they travel, in which they may glaze over, read a book, or surreptitiously scrutinize other passengers. Yet Bissell also draws attention to “the otherworldly flashes, glows, sparks and orbs that punctuate the dark of night” and “the magical green lights of trackside signals,” identifying some of the illuminated phenomena outside the train that stand out from the surrounding gloom (52–­53). Other elements of the nocturnal landscape include the orange skyglow that heralds an approaching town, evanescent scenes of trackside night work, and roadside advertisements. In built-­up areas, streetlights, filling stations, floodlit sports fields, shop windows, and domestic interiors with flickering televisions may be briefly glimpsed. At night, mobile energies are prominent, with ribbons of moving light formed by flowing vehicular traffic, rhythmic traffic lights, or the urgent flashing of emergency vehicles. Rural

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landscapes are contrastingly experienced as a sequence of glimpsed illuminated highlights: buildings, livestock batteries, car lights bisecting the dark, and solitary dwellings amid rural blackness, their lit windows maybe conjuring a sense of homey warmth. Any illuminated feature close to the track disappears in a phosphorescent blur. Driving and Cycling at Night While Schivelbusch describes the revelatory ways in which perception of the landscape was enabled by early train travel, Sandy Isenstadt details the revolution provided by the automobile from the 1910s, focusing on the mobile perception of the road in the dark. Isenstadt (2011, 229) claims that to “position oneself at the vertex of a cone of light and propel it across a darkened landscape must count as one of the most startling visual experiences of the twentieth century.” He evocatively describes the transformative perceptual effects of the car headlight in producing “a luminous space unprecedented in its ubiquitous mobility” through which “drivers and passengers found themselves at the vertex of a luminous cavity moving through a mantle of dark” (213). This initially enthralling capacity to direct a moving vehicle transformed the mobile encounter with nocturnal space and introduced a new visual practice whereby the forward focus of car drivers “repeatedly scanned a constantly shifting field of view to classify heterogeneous luminous signals in terms of hindrance, continu­ ance, or irrelevance” (214). Isenstadt further discusses how car headlights “rendered forms in a novel fashion,” exaggerating their shape and throwing long shadows that extended to join the surrounding darkness. Such objects, he continues, “bloomed gradually into nocturnal form, then sharpened for an instant and, just as swiftly were gone” (218), especially in the less-­illuminated countryside. The beam’s span structured the experience of the road surface, which brightened as it approached. As Monica Büscher and John Urry (2009, 102) assert, the bicycle can also “sensuously extend human capacities into and across the world,” and “provide various ways of framing impression.” The cyclist, too, uses illumination to guide passage through dark landscapes. Though initially “dim, awkward to install, liable to sway greatly, and easily extinguished,” the bicycle lamp has technically advanced to provide a secure, reliable device and affords a distinctive means through which to envision dark space while mobile (Isenstadt 2011, 213). To identify how the slower, less-­insulated practice of cycling, with its narrower beam, produces different sensations and perceptions of the dark landscape, I draw on the experiences of Matt,

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who has been cycling around rural Bedfordshire after dark for thirty years to train for competitive races (Cook and Edensor 2014). On most nights, the dark walls of hedgerows and trees frame much of the route and form a boundary to the fields beyond. When the moon is not visible and urban skyglow fades, an inky blackness descends within which the boundaries of the body merge. The beam emitted from Matt’s headlamp provides almost the sole source of light, cutting a moving tunnel through the thick darkness. The more narrowly focused beam and the slower speed at which things are perceived intensifies an appreciation of the forms of trees, gates, and sections of hedgerow, highlighted against the darkness. The night cyclist becomes attuned to shifting levels of light and dark influenced by season, weather, and hour. Surroundings may be tinctured with brightness when clouds are low and the lights cast by towns are reflected to form an orange ceiling. James Attlee (2011, 5) discusses how moonlight changes “colours and contours in its shape-­shifting light.” In the Bedfordshire countryside, when the moon shines brightly after rainfall, lanes glow silver and a pale radiance covers the landscape. Early winter nightfall shapes the temporal experience of darkness; so does the thickness of vegetation during the summer months. High hedges and overhanging trees accentuate the sense of traveling through a tunnel, but this dissipates when the landscape suddenly opens up as the road is unbounded by lofty vegetation, revealing the radio masts and large trees that provide a sense of orientation. Cycling in the dark also focuses greater attention on nonvisual sensations, including the cold of the handlebars, the texture of the road, scents that emerge from hedgerows, and the sounds of distant traffic and nearby wildlife. Progress is interrupted when deer gather under the shelter of trees or foxes and hares cross the road. The absence of manifold sights also causes attention to focus on the body and its capacities, the rhythm of pedaling and feelings of tiredness or energy. It is also crucial to underline how the cultural associations of darkness are also stimulated, for besides sensual pleasures and discomforts, cycling through the nocturnal rural landscape invariably conjures up the imaginary, fantastic, and phantasmagorical, foregrounding how the distinction between the nonrepresentational and the representational aspects of encountering landscape are folded together. Darkness, as emphasized earlier, has potency in stimulating fervid imaginaries about the unseen or dimly visible, calling forth a catalog of local legends, children’s tales, myths, media representations, and memories. This is well exemplified as Matt approaches the site that local story

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identifies as where a pilot lost control of his airplane and crashed into a tree during an aeronautical display at an airshow, triggering a shudder. Matt also experiences a frisson of fear when passing a ruined church at which satanic rituals were supposedly enacted in the 1960s. Such embedded cultural associations of the dark with the supernatural and the macabre recur and are not easily banished from thought. I have discussed gloomy landscapes, and how they are visually and nonvisually apprehended, focusing on pastoral Bedfordshire, an afforested Scottish glen, a mountainous urban park, and the generic space of the road. Just as particular landscapes are shaped by and perceived with the light that falls across them, the levels of darkness that shroud specific landscapes condition the apprehension of nocturnal space. Seeing with the dark landscape alters according to seasonal patterns of light and dark, the phases of the moon and movement of stars, the play of the clouds, and the shifting availability of vegetation cover. Geological and arboreal silhouettes, undulations and flat stretches, light-­reflecting surfaces such as wet rock, bodies of water and snow, and those that contrastingly absorb light further shape the nocturnal gaze, as does the imprint of human illumination in forming points of light, along with instances of natural phosphorescence in algal blooms and glowworms. Allied to these distinguishing elements are nonvisual sensations such as the endless pulse of cicadas or croaking frogs, music that wafts through the darkness, and the scent of night blooms or smoke. As Lloyd Jones (2006, 23) depicts in his novel Mister Pip, in the tropics “night falls quickly, there is no lingering memory of the day just been. One moment you can see the dogs looking skinny and mangy. In the next they have turned into black shadows.” On the equator, darkness is unvarying, always lasting for twelve hours. Contrastingly, in the Arctic Circle, daylight never arrives in the depths of winter, darkness persisting for several months. Thus far in this chapter, I have explored how darkness transforms the apprehension and practice of landscapes, yet none of these settings is completely dark; indeed, the experiences are shaped by the different levels and forms of light against which darkness contrasts and which reveal certain forms and elements. Now, however, I consider spaces in which complete darkness reigns, investigating the different sensory, affective, social, and perceptual effects that are stimulated in the absence of any light. The experience of pitch-­black space is also thoroughly context specific, depending on the kinds of activities and purposes for which darkness is being deployed. I demonstrate how complete darkness triggers a wide range of

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responses from those in its midst, capturing the enduring ambivalence that surrounds such blackness. Walking through an Ersatz New York in Total Darkness The first site is a former tourist attraction in New York City, Dialogue in the Dark, in the popular complex of the South Street Seaport and one of seventeen similar current exhibitions worldwide at the time I visited (Dialogue in the Dark 2012). This attraction avowedly aims to provide an insight into how the blind and partially sighted apprehend the world, with the franchise’s founder, Andreas Heinecke, keen to promote empathy and communication with the blind “without hindrances of insecurity, pity or prejudice” while encouraging visitors to abandon usual patterns of perception and sensation. In New York, Dialogue consisted of a walking journey through five simulated Manhattan sites. Upon entry, visitors are provided with a walking cane and seated in a small chamber on light boxes that slowly dim so that the transition to pitch black is not alarmingly sudden and eyes become accustomed to darkness. Subsequently, as visitors expectantly wait, a blind or partially sighted guide verbally greets them and provides some ground rules, intimating that the inevitable physical contact should not be repetitively greeted with apology. Valerie, our guide, requested that we follow the sound of her voice and use the stick to locate ourselves. Though at first an unfamiliar maneuver, using the cane provided a comforting, tactile sense of the path’s location and its concrete materiality. The first locale, “Central Park,” was replete with sounds of water, birdsong, and peoples’ conversations. Visitors are requested to place their hands in the “fountain” and feel the foliage and flowers. Undoubtedly, the sensations of flowing water, temperature, and texture are far more powerfully experienced in the absence of vision. Similarly, the sounds of conversing people conveyed a sense of happy conviviality generated by the multitude of New Yorkers and tourists who take their pleasure in Manhattan’s vast green swathe, focusing sensory appreciation on its nonvisual qualities. The sense of touch predominated in the next zone, the adjoining “supermarket,” where visitors handled commodities to ascertain whether they could recognize them. With loose items of fruit and vegetables, touch proved surprisingly accurate as a means of identification, with a marrow, a lemon, and an aubergine all readily distinguishable. The subsequent experience involved a pared-­down simulation of a subway station and train, and this was revealing of the difficulties of moving through utter darkness, here,

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walking down the steps into the subway and locating the train doors. It seems impossible that such maneuvers could be undertaken in the far more complex space of the real subway system without sight, and the steering presence of the guide was essential. This difficulty in making sense of and navigating space in the absence of vision was exacerbated when we were thrust into a simulation of Times Square, where the smells and sounds of this frenetically busy place composed an overwhelming multisensual blitz. This produced the most disorienting and least pleasant experience of the tour, a dense racket that conveyed chaos, a paralyzing soundscape that overwhelmed attempts to gain any sense of location in the dark. However, Valerie informed us that the blind are gradually able to distinguish between sounds, their distance, and their provenance, though this was difficult to imagine. To end the tour, we were ushered into an ersatz café, sitting down amid the enveloping coffee aromas, and the lights gradually came on to reveal the guide. Movement and orientation in this ersatz Manhattan was engendered by the vocal and physical guidance of Valerie, highlighting the different intimacies and forms of communication fostered in the dark. The tone and accent of voice, its inflexions and encouragements, the gentle, tactile chaperoning through the darkness, and the continuous physical closeness and feel of breath and body heat generated a precious connection between guide and visitor. This tactile and sonic intimacy, along with smells, sounds, and proprioception, certainly emerged in the surrounding, indeterminate blackness. Yet though the attraction endeavors to solicit sensory as well as social empathy for the condition of blindness, as sighted people we did not see nothing. For as Roy Sorensen (2004, 457) insists, we actually see in the dark, but “not what we generally wish to see or in the manner we generally wish to see.” In total darkness there may be nothing visually distinguishable, but we do see the enveloping blackness and we persistently strain to see anything within it. Moreover, we are possessed of the reassurance that we will duly enter the visible world once more. In addition, for those who possess vision, darkness stimulates a mental picture to form of the imperceptible place, exemplifying MacPherson’s (2009, 1049) claim that “the process of seeing is dependent not only on the physical organ of sight but also on memory and imagination.” Perhaps without having acquired advanced meditation techniques, it is impossible to still the imagination in dark space, fueled as it is by memories of places and representations, and simply accept the darkness as a featureless realm. Because I had prior experience of the two specific simulated sites conjured

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up in Dialogue in the Dark, namely, Central Park and Times Square, and also possess a catalog of memories of the three generic sites—­a supermarket, a subway station and train, and a coffee shop—­I could draw on these recollections in easily imagining their appearance. A sense of place was thus conjured up by the sounds, smells, and textures and augmented by an imaginary that drew on visual recollection. Impressionistic images of fountains, supermarket aisles, and subway stations were invariably brought to mind, not as picture-­perfect scenes but as amalgams of visual and other sensory impressions. Eating in the Dark: Dans le Noir? A less mobile, more confined, sensorially divergent, and socially peculiar experience of complete darkness is offered by Dans le Noir? in London, one of several restaurants in cities across the world that offer the experience of dining without any light whatsoever. The restaurant advertises its attractions by preparing would-­be diners for a visit: “By suppressing the dominant sense of sight, you will enter a world in which one is uncertain of surroundings and experiences” (Dans le Noir? n.d.). Upon entering Dans le Noir?, diners arrive in a modest, illuminated bar and are provided with a menu. Most people opt for the “surprise menu” for which no information is provided, so that they can enjoy guessing what they are eating. After a short time, diners are introduced to their waiter, a partially sighted or blind employee, and placing their hands on the shoulders of the person in front, they cautiously make their way to their table along a twisting corridor that culminates in complete darkness. A far more detailed ethnographic account of the range of diners’ experiences can be found elsewhere (Edensor and Falconer 2015). Here I provide a brief summary of the key themes that emerged from fifty interviews undertaken with diners after the meal. Most diners interviewed expressed their predilection for undertaking challenging and novel experiences, particularly with regard to dining. While aware that they would be eating food in a completely lightless environment, many commented that they were nonetheless startled by the degree of darkness, testifying to the rarity of encountering total blackness. Responses to this blackout were varied and ambivalent, many relating that it enthralled them, with such comments as “I loved experiencing the daily task of eating food in a whole new way,” “It was a sensory guessing game!,” and “It was a lot of fun to have to figure out what you’re eating.” For others, however, the experience produced anxiety and discomfort, with responses like “I felt really small, very self-­conscious and slightly afraid of

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the unexpected,” “Eating food you don’t trust in the dark is just unpleasant,” and “I felt lost. It was all horrible sensations.” There was also little consensus on the effects of the darkness on the sensorium, though a majority found the experience stimulating. Some expressed enthusiasm: “What an amazing experience! The dining room is pitch-­black which awakens every other sense you have.” Many referred to the amplification of sound and tactility, commenting on how they managed to orient themselves to the immediate surroundings of table and utensils, whereas beyond this limited orbit, all sense of direction and detail was lacking. For instance, as one diner admitted, “I thought I had the room figured out, and then we walked out in a completely different direction to what I thought. . . . Even though it was dark I thought I could have some sort of understanding of the room!” The lack of light also prompted some diners to envisage the unseeable room, bringing out the points raised above about how we tend to imagine what is imperceptible. For example, one diner remarked about how he had a sense that there was a high ceiling with “very, very high arches, and vaults like old fashioned dungeons, but it was completely imaginary.” Others focused on the disorienting babble of noise produced by the welter of merging conversation, without the relief provided by visual information, which if it had been available, would perhaps have relegated the noise to inattention. Most striking was the sensory experience of eating in total darkness, with most diners referring to the intensity of the food, its flavors, consistencies, chewiness, smoothness, or graininess. Yet despite these enhanced sensations, nearly all failed to recognize the foods they ate, often provoking astonishment at their own presumed ineptitude: “I can’t believe I didn’t recognise tastes and textures just because I couldn’t see them,” and “Rhubarb I’ve had before, but I simply couldn’t identify it! Even with such a distinct flavour, it’s like your usual mechanisms don’t work anymore.” This inability, which both intrigued and exasperated diners, raises interesting questions about the role of vision in taste but also points to how certain senses are enhanced in the dark, whereas others are ineffective in discerning aspects of the world, at least for those unhabituated to such conditions. As with Dialogue in the Dark, certain circumstances are rendered unintelligible in complete darkness. Yet though the incapacity to see might instigate frustration, other experiences were accentuated, most notably the tactile and verbal communication that was fostered. Dark dining kindled an amplification of social engagement, producing an affective connection between diners and a shared sense of adventure. This was manifest toward the wait staff, who

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provided a security that diners valued, as one diner expressed: “I really trusted and felt connected with our waitress Claire, she placed her hand on my hand and on her shoulder, so I knew it would be fine.” The sense of touch was also accentuated among table companions, who found it reassuring and intimate, as one woman discussed in expressing how it “was really nice touching my boyfriend’s face. I wouldn’t be able to do that with anyone else or in a more public place.” These bonds also extended to other diners, for darkness permitted certain kinds of interaction and a deeper association with others that would be less likely if light reigned, as one interviewee explained: “I felt really safe and like I could have brought up things I wouldn’t normally in a lightened room. I felt more intimate and connected.” Others expanded on this theme, with one declaring that she “loved the conversation with total strangers. I imagine in a lit room, in that environment people would keep silent. Our whole table were swapping tips and advice.” Diners suggested that a key factor here was that the inability to assess appearance and eating habits fostered a spreading conviviality through which social restraint was cast aside and judgments based on appearance were suspended. As one diner emphasized, “All propriety and table manners disappear!” It is apparent from this brief survey that dining in the dark enhanced certain sensory and social experiences while impairing others. Responses to the event varied considerably and underline both the subjective experience of darkness and the multiple ways in which it is decoded and valued. This diversity and ambivalence is further developed in the following encounter with complete darkness. A Concert in the Dark Eclipse In July 2011, as part of Manchester International Festival, a blind couple from Mali, Amadou and Mariam, staged Eclipse, an experimental concert performed in complete darkness. Once more, the show was devised to instill an empathetic sense for the blind and provide a sense of how music might be perceived in the absence of sight. A key element of today’s pop music concert is the light show, devised in increasingly sophisticated ways to enhance the experience. In Eclipse, such effects were absent, as was any sight of the band until the culmination of the set, which lasted nearly ninety minutes. As was the case with sound and touch in Dialogue in the Dark, and taste, tactility, and social intimacy in Dans le Noir?, the experience of listening to highly amplified music in the dark thoroughly intensified the concert’s

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auditory qualities. Audience members were able to attend to the nuances of the melodies and rhythms that washed over the pitch-­black venue and created a lush sonic environment, the musical sound overwhelming other sensory experiences. This sonic absorption was augmented by the narrative passages read out by the Malian poet Hamadoun Tandina between songs, interludes that focused on the couple’s path to romance, marriage, parenthood, and fame. This story was accompanied by recorded sounds of crowing cocks, chirruping crickets, chattering children, running water, and the revving engines of cars and mopeds that evocatively conjured up lively landscapes from Mali and Senegal. These auditory effects were further supplemented by other multisensory techniques in moments where warm air and scents of sandalwood, mosquito repellent, cloves, and jasmine wafted through the pitch-­black concert hall. Though these sensory effects and the power of the music were captivating, the absence of the audience rituals and sense of shared occasion that shapes the usual experience of live music performance were somewhat disconcerting. The communicative efforts of the performers, the light show, and the emotions expressed and transmitted by the gestures and facial expressions of the crowd could not be experienced under these circumstances. In sharp contrast to the animated crowd response that typifies most rock concerts, as people dance, shout out, and sing along, on this occasion the audience was peculiarly quiet, with polite applause greeting the end of songs. The darkness seemed to encourage this quietness, drawing the crowd into a rich sound world but providing none of the familiar visual cues for participation. This quiescence was compounded by its contrast with the start of the event. The excitement produced by the strangeness of what we were about to witness intensified as people were guided by ushers to their seats in the dark, and an air of anticipation grew, articulated by a vibrant hubbub that saturated the hall. Yet this excitement dissipated as the sounds of music and commentary enveloped the arena. When the concert drew to a close with a rousing finale, the lights gradually rose to reveal a resplendent Amadou and Mariam and their band onstage. Suddenly, after being deprived of sight, immersed in their own responses to the music, the audience was catalyzed by the abrupt transformation in sensory experience and affective communication. Audience members collectively created a great surge in noise, dancing and cheering as they became reattuned to the concert by the visual cues offered by the animated musicians and other spectators. In Eclipse, visual deprivation had served to affectively distance the audi-

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ence from the musicians and other concertgoers, revealing the profoundly social and communicative dimensions that generate concert atmospheres. The pulsing rhythm urged us to dance, although fear of bumping into other people and obstacles cultivated a cautious somatic engagement with the music. Even so, the deployment of darkness can be construed as effective, for at the concert’s conclusion there was plenteous recompense. During the final “reveal,” a sensual and social connection was reengaged, offering a satisfying emotional climax that drew its power precisely from the earlier deprivation. Accordingly, the show further exemplifies the ambiguity of darkness, its capacity to both heighten and restrict particular sensations, and its propensity to foster and suffocate the emergence of atmospheres depending on contexts. Staging Darkness Tino Seghal’s This Variation Finally, I look at the use of what appears to be complete darkness as a tool to cleverly disarm participants in an art installation / performance that was part of Manchester’s 2013 International Festival. Tino Seghal’s This Variation took place in a now-­disused part of Piccadilly train station, the semiderelict Mayfield Depot, which formerly stored and dispatched parcels from within its cavernous interior and was briefly opened up as a temporary festival venue. Visitors entered the echoing building and, after crossing a huge hall, were guided along a short passage to a room. Inside, all appeared completely dark, and the room’s dimensions and planes were impossible to judge. I imagined that it possessed areas that sloped, with perhaps sudden drops bounded by railings. Once more, this exemplifies how in the absence of light, the mind conjures up an impression of that which cannot be perceived. In the blackness, chirruping noises reverberated, and then sonorous voices accompanied them. These sounds seemed recorded, and they animated the unseen space with a liveliness that was not initially apparent. Gradually, vision adapted to the gloom. At first, only shadowy forms could be ascertained, but steadily the room’s flat, square shape became visible, refuting my imaginary construction, and then the figures took on a more substantial form. As eyes became attuned to the darkness, it became obvious that it was they who were responsible for the sounds. The ever-­changing soundscape shifted from a cappella singing to better-­known songs, occasionally giving way to spoken words. Subsequently, a romantic slow song was the trigger for the dancers to gently draw close to visitors, embracing some of them in a slow dance. After becoming accustomed to

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the gloom, it was comical to watch new arrivals, edging blindly into the room, arms outstretched. By contrast, those who had stayed for a while became part of the event, joining in the dance, responding to those who gently solicited them. Initially, the experience of This Variation underlines the power of darkness to disrupt, even shock a body unfamiliar with it, and to focus attention on nonvisual sensations. Yet as we came to realize that the darkness was not total, after fifteen to twenty minutes, as the eye’s rod cells were activated and vision adapted to the weak light attached to the ceiling, we were able to perceive most essential details. Seghal’s work thus plays with our ability to adjust to very—­though not completely—­dark conditions during the time we spend in the room. Indeed, this is crucial to the success of the piece. In a fully lit, visible space in which interpreters were transparently singing and dancing, visitors would probably shrink from the scene in embarrassment or watch uneasily from the sidelines. Foreknowledge of dancing and being hugged may well induce grim anticipation of such intimate physical contact. However, as visitors only gradually become aware what is happening in their midst, most appear to be disarmed, even charmed, by the subtle interactions taking place. Seghal’s works are “relational artworks,” devised to produce social experiences and instigate sociability (Downey 2007). The crucial element in This Variation is the initial perception of darkness, for visitors start out alone, guessing about what is going on, and only gradually come to belong to a community. In this sense, darkness opens up the potential for physical and affective communication that “dismantles the traditionally passive role of the viewer and the static condition of the artwork” (Metzger 2013, 4), constituting a social experience forged in interaction between visitors, interpreters, and space. In discussing plays staged in the dark, Martin Welton (2013, 5) similarly claims that the “visual experience of darkness is one of proximity,” as a sense of distance between the observer, other people, and space diminishes. Conclusion This chapter, like the previous one, has underlined the varied experiences and complex ambiguities stimulated by encountering dark space. However, three clear themes emerge from the engagements with the gloomy and completely dark spaces discussed above, namely, enhanced sensation, reconfigured social engagement, and imaginative involvement. First, the pervasive spread of illumination, what Welton calls a “luminous superabundance,”

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has made darkness deeply unfamiliar for most people in the West (6). This has consequently restricted opportunities to perceive space in very different ways to that of the daylit and illuminated world, precluding the significance of darkness as a medium in which perceptions, sensations, and social connections can be practiced and experienced very differently. As Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 46) asserts, darkness can “dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.” This sensory alterity has great potential to enrich, reconfigure, and interrogate visual experience. In gloomy landscapes, once vision becomes attuned to the dark, seeing is directed to features that are rarely noticed. Shiny things, silhouettes, dark gatherings, tones of gray, and the luminosity of the night sky all command attention. Seeing with limited forms of light while mobile renders the landscape linear and partial, highlighting the textures and forms of things close at hand, and producing a tunnel of light through which to pass. In a dark landscape, the impression of light while mobile is transformed, with isolated points of light serving as orientation points, glimpses of illuminated domestic and work scenes rendered strange, and nearby lights distorted into blurred flashes. In totally dark space, seeing objects is impossible, a lack that prompts imaginary compositions of scenes that are inaccessible to sight. The inability to discern any spatial characteristics also offers opportunities for the suspension of visual judgment, providing welcome relief from the critical scrutiny of others. However, an inability to see also provokes fear, alienation, detachment, and mistrust. It can generate a sense of detachment from what is happening, and without sight, sound can overwhelm and confuse. Whatever the emotive response, darkness is visually perceived, though no detail at all can be seen amid an all-­encompassing blackness. Equally important, darkness enriches nonvisual sensation. The sounds and smells of the landscape reinforce an understanding of its vitality. Efforts to balance and navigate on foot produce an enhanced appreciation of the tactile qualities specific to place and landscape. The nonvisual sensations of cycling and running are similarly intensified in the dark, the workings of the legs, breathing, the feel of the ground and the bike, the breeze, and a less-­insulated immersion in air, moisture, and temperature. These sensations are intensified in complete darkness, with sound particularly potent, yet the capacities of the ear and the taste buds to accurately relay information can be thwarted. In moving across dark space, the body “connects and disconnects to and from the landscape although being simultaneously entangled with it” in distinctive ways, with different points of connection

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and disconnection, and different entanglements through which the senses are continuously recalibrated (Lund 2012, 3). The experience of these nonvisual senses provides a corrective for ocular­ centrism. In discussing tourism, Caroline Scarles (2009, 467) asserts that “tourists encounter the world multisensually and multidimensionally,” not merely through the “tourist gaze.” This is rendered salient in considering that currently, leisure practices seek out sensual alterity beyond the visual, and this demand is accommodated by the commodification of an increasing number of areas, as the dark attractions explored here testify. Yet though such experiences may be commodified, this does not necessarily devalue them, for sensing the world though tactility, sound, smell, and taste undercuts normative modes of apprehension, potentially revealing the situ­ated, habitual ways and cultural values through which we make sense of things. In the dark, we sense otherwise, underlining Jim Drobnick’s (2005, 273) suggestion that “the poetry of existence” is enhanced by “cultivating diverse sensory experiences and a heightened sensitivity towards the immediate physicality of the world.” Second, in addition to these sensory alterities, darkness, especially total darkness, promotes different forms of social engagement. Most diners interviewed at Dans le Noir? commented on how intimacy with waiters, other diners, and friends and relatives was deepened in the absence of sight, augmented by touch and the sonic qualities of voices. I have shown how reliance on guides and waiters engenders a sense of connection, fostering gratitude for those who make journeying and residing in darkness more comfortable. In This Variation, gradual visual adjustment to what at first appeared to be total darkness was used as a way to produce a social engagement that minimized social inhibitions. These nonjudgmental, intimate connections reveal how vision can serve to distance people and objects from the self. Seeing the other makes explicit our separation from persons or things, yet this is denied in the dark where, as Rob Shaw (2014, 6) submits, “night penetrates into our sense of self—­it erodes the body and its independence from other objects.” Without sight, such distinctions are not so easily made, and accordingly, different connections with otherness are facilitated. As the material form and shape of the world dissolves, meaning comes to reside in other sense-­making processes, denying impulses to distinguish the other from the self through judgments and classifications facilitated by vision. There is little evidence for the dissimilarity of the other, producing an ambiguous situation in which, as Tom Sparrow

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(2013, 6) contends, that “who or what others may be becomes less fact than possibility.” Third and finally, the capacities of darkness to stimulate the imagination are particularly compelling. Anna Steidle and Lioba Werth (2013, 76) are explicit about how darkness decreases feelings of self-­consciousness and freedom from scrutiny. A darkened room, they claim, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-­determination and reduced inhibition  .  .  . and promotes a risky, explorative, and less vigilant task processing style,” as bodies attune to what seems to be a more informal setting. It is certainly the case that darkness stimulates terror, with all manner of imagined ghostly and sinister creatures provoked by its obscurity, and without visual contact with the world, a slide toward introspective solitude can emerge. Yet as I have shown, the meditative potential of darkness is also potent, as mindfulness is enabled precisely through this inward focus. Moreover, as is abundantly clear, darkness is loaded with a host of cultural representations and understandings, and these can intrude on the experience of dark space, as exemplified by the fears that spring to mind as Matt cycles past a church associated with creepy goings-­on. Yet beyond these reference points and allusions, darkness can also inculcate a sense of mystery, profundity, and speculation, in which the process of trying to see and feel your way through space gives rise to unfamiliar, unbidden thoughts and fantasies.

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Conclusion The Novelty of Light and the Value of Darkness

I n t h i s b o o k , I have highlighted how daylight, illumination, and darkness are conditions in which a diverse range of practices takes place and around which an array of often contesting meanings circulate. As integral elements in human understanding, sensing, perception, and practice of the world, no essential qualities can be attributed to light and dark, and this is underlined by the fluid, dynamic geographical and temporal contexts within which they are experienced according to widely diverging cultural norms. I have discussed the varied understandings of daylight as it shapes the experience of place and landscape. I have focused on the baleful effects of overillumination and poor design and countered these negative aspects by focusing on creative efforts to produce more sustainable, aesthetic forms  of lighting. I have looked at how power deploys illumination in diverse ways and how such measures are resisted. I have also looked at the affective and emotional qualities that foreground how light and dark are always more than representational in their effects. Finally, I have explored the divergent ways in which darkness has been construed and practiced, arguing that widespread fear and vilification, leading to its gradual disappearance in many settings, has led to a renewed quest for experiences of darkness and a recalibration of the relationship between light and dark. To emphasize, daylight, darkness, and illumination are invariably suffused with cultural values and myriad practices that solicit divergent sensory, affective, and emotional responses. As I have inferred throughout, these cultural meanings, values, and practices are being questioned in multiple ways, and settled understandings of light and dark are evaporating. New technologies, desires, artistic approaches, powers, and commercial opportunities are dynamically emerging to undercut prior certainties. These dramatic developments mean that the future ways in which light and dark are practiced, understood, and sensed can only be imagined. In this 213

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brief conclusion, I identify three key processes through which we might consider these realignments, and discuss how they might eventuate in progressive or dystopian outcomes. Light and Dark as Signifiers of Inequality One particular chapter of this book discusses how illumination is deployed as an expression of power and highlights the inequalities that may be inscribed on space by the uneven distribution of light. However, this theme also resonates through other discussions. Power is manifest by illumination in numerous ways. I have explored how media screens, illuminated corporate logos, and brightly lit advertisements dominate urban commercial space, imprinting certain meanings and identities on the black canvas of the night. Similarly, state power can be dramatically demonstrated by the illumination of selective symbolic historic buildings, state institutions, and monuments. These techniques of highlighting and foregrounding specific elements are always liable to distort the urban nightscape more dramatically than in the day, when the privileged signs and sites of the powerful must compete with visual multiplicity. There is thus every reason to remain vigilant toward those who would dominate the appearance of the nocturnal city, especially considering the expanding technological means that are available to produce bigger, brighter, more compelling forms of lighting. Science fiction movies such as Blade Runner prefigure the kinds of distorted nightscapes that may eventuate if corporate power grows unchecked. Other signifiers of power are constituted by the military technologies deployed by superior forces to intimidate, terrify, and disorient opponents on the battlefield. These psychological and sensory assaults with light echo the smaller-­scale use of searchlights to follow criminal suspects and dazzling illumination to unhinge prisoners under interrogation. These operations are characterized by huge technological inequalities that enable some to see in the dark through heat-­and motion-­detecting equipment while others can see nothing. As with many technologies, military science serves as a vanguard in developing such light applications, and there are always dangers that such threatening techniques can extend into civilian space, through intensified surveillance, for instance. Jules Bourdais’s unrealized designs for a Tour Soleil testifies to the desires of the powerful to be all seeing, deploying lighting to continually scrutinize citizens. I have also focused on how illumination is a realm of contestation in which those who claim to possess greater capacity for aesthetic discrimination, more refined judgment, and superior taste denounce what they iden-

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tify as lighting of poor aesthetic quality. Some of these people seek status as cultural intermediaries, able to pronounce on the quality of art and urban design. Their widely broadcast disdain for particular forms of vernacular and traditional lighting are aligned with assumptions about the assumed failings of those who create and consume them. In an era of intensified consumption, the proliferation of lighting designs means that the expertise and authority of such critics has been decentered, yet this has not quieted their often vitriolic critiques. Indeed, this multiplicity heightens their aesthetic anxieties, inciting further desires to secure the social and cultural distinction they seek. As state operations shrink and control over energy supply is ceded to corporations and fragmented outfits as part of neoliberal privatization agendas, chaotic and disorganized provision results in highly uneven distribution and, in the worst cases, frequent blackouts. As the age of peak oil passes, such situations perhaps conjure up dystopian scenarios in which a few scarce lights flicker in a postnuclear or environmentally devastated world. Light is prefigured to indicate possession of scarce resources or as scattered sites of human settlement. In certain areas of the world, the inequalities between those who have access to reliable lighting and those who lack such access is marked. The distribution of illumination in developing countries such as Ghana and India, as I have shown, is skewed in favor of the powerful, who control supply and have the means to acquire alternative technologies when power is uneven or curtailed. Such inequalities persist in certain realms and expand in others. We might envisage that current austerity agendas being pursued by Western governments and related political decisions to starve local governments of funding might eventuate in a reduction in public lighting that resonates with the iniquitous distribution of illumination in earlier times. In this case, rather than understood as a right, illumination may be recast as a scarce “positional good,” possessed by only a few people (Hirsch 1977). Despite these neoliberal agendas that threaten universal electric supply, a host of strategies are deployed by the weak to gain access to lighting, for instance, by subversively tapping into power lines and collaborating to purchase communal forms of illumination. Tendencies to create disparities in the quality of lighting allocated to different urban areas is also being combated by socially conscious light designers who campaign for deprived areas to be better lit. They also engage in collaborative projects to devise high-­quality, place-­specific lighting to sites that have previously been supplied with inferior functional lighting. The future global distribution of

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lighting, and of poor-­and high-­quality illumination, is likely to be highly contested, fraught, and locally variable. Moving Away from Standardized Lighting Perhaps the most exciting developments lie in burgeoning approaches to deploying illumination in creative ways, heralding the replacement of the poor-­quality lighting that has culminated in widespread disenchantment with illuminated space. The demise of standardized measurements and techniques among professionals indicates a far more variegated approach to illumination, in which light designers are increasingly embracing aesthetic and technological diversity. Enhanced place-­making strategies are using innovative forms of illumination that underpin the qualities of particular sites and areas. Plans tailored to architectural characteristics, peculiar features, and historic sites are fostering new ways to produce a sense of place after dark. Current design approaches are also offering greater spatial legibility, moving away from the light clutter that has made many urban places chaotic in appearance. Recent advances also include the installation of site-­specific artworks that respond to and celebrate place, resonating with its history and cultural identity, producing new spaces of public assembly. Already constituting a provocative and diverse accumulation of works, art installations and conceptual pieces continue to develop new modes of expression that foster sensory reattunement, produce disorientation, and defamiliarize place. Other strategies involve the codesign of the city with collaborating communities, fostering a broader appreciation of forms of vernacular illumination and testing out the possibilities promised by new forms of responsive lighting. These unprofessional expressions are also evident in the vast increase in the range of lighting produced for the domestic market, with many designs to choose from, providing greater scope for households to move away from standardized designs. The continued expansion of festivals also heralds the emergence of challenging works that defamiliarize places, bringing into question normative ways in which they are sensed and understood. Besides revealing the operations through which the sensible is distributed, they delight onlookers and participants. Other illuminated festive installations encourage forms of physical engagement and social interaction, generating a conviviality that temporarily transforms nocturnal public spaces. Such festivals, moreover, are occasions on which experimentation and exchange among artists, designers, engineers, and technicians occur, extending and enhancing

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creativity. Yet such festive occasions are not only shaped by professionals, for the increase in local, smaller-­scale events such as lantern parades promotes forms of vernacular creativity and fosters the building of a shared sense of belonging. Though these developments are undoubtedly progressive and suggest that the vocabulary of light design is expanding, with a myriad array of creative and technological advances, perhaps this is a phase that will become exhausted and illumination will devolve once more into standardized, homogeneous forms and generic festive attractions as artistic and technical innovation slows. Furthermore, political imperatives for greater sustainability may impinge on diversity, restricting the scope for lighting fixtures that depend on larger quantities of electricity for their efficacy. Yet perhaps a greater threat is posed by the commercial appropriation of technical and artistic innovation to produce saturated advertising and promotional nightscapes. While innovative forms of lighting are foregrounded at today’s festivals and in artworks, capital is always liable to adopt and adapt these inventions to sell commodities and broadcast corporate identity, exploiting inventive practices and compromising artistic creativity. Revaluing Darkness Another recent progressive development has been the dwindling influence of dominant religious and enlightenment notions that contend that light is good and darkness is bad. Such ideas have come under critical scrutiny and seem to be losing their purchase, along with an awareness that light and dark are never discrete, singular conditions but characterized by multiple levels and, moreover, need each other to be most effective. Modernist notions that illumination should be maximized to push back the frontiers of ignorance and enhance safety are losing their salience. For instance, it increasingly seems absurdly financially profligate and wasteful in terms of energy expenditure to allow the lights of large office blocks and streetlights to blaze throughout the night while most urban inhabitants are asleep. Concerns about the malign effects that constant bright lighting has on human health are growing, as studies point to stress levels and lack of sleep, and these are aligned with wider ecological concerns about the impact of illumination on the rhythms of nocturnally active and migrating creatures. Such anxieties may result in drastically lower levels of illumination and the widespread installation of responsive systems that react to motion and daylight to minimize energy output, switching lighting off when there is no human presence.

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A reconsideration of the positive attributes of darkness has been further generated by various contemporary impulses to seek gloom. Most obviously, dark sky campaigners aim to transform large swathes of rural space, minimizing the effects of illumination to maximize conditions of darkness after nightfall. The groups of astronomers, naturalists, and conservationists that promote the further spread of dark-­sky designations offer new ways to experience nocturnal space untainted by lighting, viewing an unfamiliar star-­filled sky and rekindling familiarity with dark landscapes while generating tourist income. Darkness is likely to extend over ever more space and may even encroach on urban desires to minimize skyglow. As trepidation and moral aversion are replaced by more positive understandings of darkness, a plethora of attractions are emerging at which people can seek diverse experiences in gloom or in total darkness. Ways of moving through dark space—­walking, driving, cycling, and by train—­ offer a wholly different experience to the daylit landscape, reconfiguring the visual apprehension of space as certain aspects disappear and others become prominent, and foregrounding nonvisual sensations, as tactility, smell, and sound are enhanced. In completely dark restaurants, tourist attractions, art spaces, and music venues, these nonvisual sensations predominate. In dark spaces, other experiences may also be solicited, such as intimacy, conviviality, imaginative conjecture, and meditation. Importantly, these modes of sensing space otherwise induce reflexivity about ordinary sensory experience, revealing how culturally circumscribed and habitual are the usual sensations that we take for granted. Though it seems as if darkness will prevail in certain areas that have been colonized by light, the rise of ever-­larger cities and rural depopulation in emerging economies are likely to result in far larger quantities of illumination to accompany this urban expansion. As illumination continues to be conceived as an index of modernity and development in many realms, formerly dark areas will be blasted with light, draining global energy resources. Like light, as darkness becomes a more cherished quality, it may become a positional good, as the wealthy seek places away from the glow of the city. Conversely, the revaluing of darkness as a positive quality in a more ecologically conscious future may ensure that its distribution is more equitable, and that modern desires to saturate space with light diminish.

Acknowledgments

A s w i t h m o s t p r o j e c t s , this book has been a labor of love, though latterly hard labor that has relied on the support and stimulation offered by numerous people without whom it would have been impossible to complete. The adventure started in 2009 when my colleague Steve Millington and I became intrigued by the Christmas light displays on the exterior of houses that emerged toward the festive season. Since then, Steve has been an engaging companion in thinking about light and dark, accompanying me in organizing several conference sessions and visits to Blackpool Illuminations. Other colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University have also been very supportive. Special thanks to Emily Falconer, whose extra­ ordinary research skills contributed to research into the Christmas lights, Blackpool Illuminations, and dining in the dark. The greatest stimulus to thinking through many of the issues explored in this book was provided by Durham’s magnificent Institute of Advanced Studies, where I was lucky enough to spend three months on a fellowship, sharing thoughts and ideas in a convivial, romantic setting. I thank the dynamic Veronica Strang for her fantastic support and for providing such an exciting scholarly environment, and I am indebted to the fellows with whom I shared such a memorable time, especially Julie Westerman. Colleagues at Roskilde University have been extremely helpful in developing the themes explored here, providing me with a stimulating and comfortable home for two months. Mikkel Bille has been a constant source of ideas and critical scrutiny, and I owe him much gratitude for his collegiality and advice. It has been fabulous to share ideas with Jonas Larsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, and Kirsten Simonsen. Thanks to the Carlsberg Foundation for supporting my visit. I enjoyed a shorter fellowship at the University of Wollongong. I am eternally thankful to Chris Gibson and Gordon Waitt for providing great 219

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companionship and collegial support, not to mention accompanying me on several adventures in and around Sydney. I thank Ben Gallan, Anna de Jong, Victoria Ikutekbe, and Elyse Stanes. I subsequently spent a particularly enlivening time at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology with the wonderful Shanti Sumartojo, who was a supportive colleague as well as great company. I am grateful to the scholars in Berlin with whom I have shared many conversations and enjoyable excursions, especially Josianne Meier and Nona Schulte-­Römer. I have enormously enjoyed my association with Northumbria University, and I thank Ysanne Holt for offering numerous opportunities to explore and communicate several of the ideas discussed in this book when they were in formative stages. I am thankful for the interest of the University of Minnesota Press in this project, and I acknowledge the excellent support provided by Jason Weidemann, Erin Warholm-­Wohlenhaus, and Paula Dragosh. There is a host of other people with whom I have shared ideas and who have supported my work on light and dark. These include Suvi Alt, Alice Barnaby, Andrew Barnfield, Sarah Barns, Marie Bonte, Elettra Bordonaro, Michael Bull, George Chatzinakos, Matt Cook, Dydia DeLyser, Jim Drobnick, Oliver Dunnett, Jim Edensor, Lars Frers, Katharina Gabriel, Collette Halstead, Ron Haselden, Harriet Hawkins, Fiona Hillary, David Howes, Tim Ingold, Sandy Isenstadt, Katharina Krause, Ankit Kumar, Mary Laing, Hayden Lorimer, Chris Lowe, Katrin Lund, Craig Martin, Ruth McDermott, Melissa Miles, Nina Morris, Hilary Orange, Joni Palmer, Elena Papadaki, Margaret Petty, Sarah Pink, Tracey Potts, Mattias Qvistrom, Richard Ryan, Anne Salmela, Susanne Seitinger, Rob Shaw, Jonathan Silver, Johanne Sloan, Judy Spark, Will Straw, Jonathan Taggart, Pip Thornton, Anna Turunen, Theo van Leeuwen, Phillip Vannini, Rosemary Williams, and Phil Wood. Finally, the greatest inspiration and support have come from my family, my marvelous sons, Jay and Kim Kothari, who accompanied me on several adventures into light and dark, and, most of all, the lovely Uma Kothari.

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Index

Aalborg, Denmark, 62 Accra, Ghana, 92 Aether, 24 Africa: cities, 183; as Darkest Africa, 84; as the Dark Continent, 169 Alhambra, Granada, 44 Alves, Teresa, 139, 182 Andalusian architecture, 44 Anglo-Saxon churches, 42 Antarctic, 34 Arctic Circle, 34, 37, 200 Attlee, James, 54, 167, 169, 180, 199 aurora borealis, 23, 34 Australia, 35, 93–94; Anzac Day, 146 Baek, Jin: borders of light and darkness, 46 Baker, Julian: British travelers in India, 176 Bakhtin, Mikhail: carnival’s function, 115 Baldwin, Peter: on urban America, 88, 169 Baltz, Lewis: photographs of Nevada desert, 35 Barnaby, Alice: on London, 175; symbolic repertoire of violent political protests, 109

Beaumont, Matthew: on London’s night, 173 Bedfordshire, England, 198–200 Belize, 29–30 Benjamin, Walter: commercial lighting, 154; profane illuminations, 118 Bennett, Jane: re-enchantment, 124 Bentham, Jeremy: panopticon, 86 Berlin, 62; Postdamer Platz, 65, 76–77, 79; Weimar, 90–91; West/East, 92, 110, 127 Bille, Mikkel, 13, 38, 43, 46; cozylight, 158–59, 169; on exclusionary methods, 86, 142, 143, 146; on Nordic lights and Danish churches, 47–49 Bissell, David: on train travel, 197–98 Black Panthers, 172–73 Blackpool, 74; image of, 97, 151–54; Pleasure Beach, 175. See also Blackpool Illuminations Blackpool Illuminations, 70–72, 76, 79, 97–98, 110, 151–54, 161 Blade Runner (film), 214 Blue Hour Lullaby (film), 86–87 Boddy, Trevor: new urban prosthetics, 145 Böhme, Gernot: on atmospheres, 139–41, 144; ecstasies, 143; on

241

242

Index

new perceptual pleasures, 109; notion of ecstatic, 13, 36 Bonfire Night, 113–14 Bourdieu, Pierre: class identities, 94–95 British: Dark Sky movement, 181–82; landscapes, 31; popular culture, 70, 75, 79, 97, 98 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 23–24, 168, 170 Brox, Jane: on cafés and taverns, 54; on nostalgia, 75, 82, 89, 179 Byzantine churches, 42, 146 California Correctional Institution, 86 Canadian off-gridders, 159, 185–86 carnivalesque, 131, 147, 151, 156, 176 “cathedrals of light” (Speer), 93 CCTV, 85 celestial tourism, 34 Château de Chambord, 187 Christianity, 24, 42, 84; belief, 168–69 Christmas, 72, 95; lights, 98, 102–3, 118, 219; modern, 157 Chromosaturation (Cruz-Diez), 4–7, 17, 123 church architecture, 24; western European, 42 Church of the Light (Japan), 46 Cichosz, Maria: tripping, notion of, 137 Claessen, Constance: sensory values, 28 Clark, Kenneth: romantic conjunction of science and ecstasy, 36 Cloud Gate (Kapoor), 39 Cochrane, Allan, 144 codesign, of the city, 62–64, 134–35, 216 collective practices, 93, 157 Collins, Jo: artificial light, 55; phantasmagorical city, 109; technological uncanny, 137 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, 101

common sense, 27, 81, 95; manifestations of, 107, 125 communitas: experience of, 130; sense of, 149; temporary, 131 community-led: collaborations, 59; initiatives, 114 conditions of luminosity, 29 Constable, John, 36 contestation, 58, 85, 98, 114, 145, 214 conviviality, xiii, 55, 114, 130, 131, 136, 137, 151–53, 158, 159, 170, 172, 178, 179, 183, 201, 205, 216, 218 Copenhagen: Sundholm, 73–74; Tivoli Gardens, 70 coproduction of atmosphere, 143, 151, 154, 156 Craig, Martin: photographic practices, 45 Cronin, Anne, 101–2 Crouch, David: lay geographical knowledge, 28 Crowd Darkening (de Schutter), 62 Cubitt, Sean: on desert, 35; establishment of monopolies, 89; evolving set of meanings, 81 cultural: capital, xi, 82, 94, 98, 106–7; conventions, 4, 27; identity, 31, 37, 38, 216; practices, xi, 23, 25, 28, 41, 49, 58, 94, 129, 139, 150, 158, 172; quarters, 73, 97; representations, 10–11, 12, 38, 49, 173, 211; values, ix, xi, 9–10, 28, 81, 159, 161, 169, 175, 210, 213 culture-led regeneration, strategies, 111 Daniel, John: day/night distinction, 191; vast sectors of the unseen, 11 dark: art, 184–85; design, 184; tourism, 170

Index Debord, Guy: society of the spectacle, 113 Department for Communities and Local Government, 101 desert: landscape, 35, 38; nocturnal blackness of, 87 Diack, Heather: attention economy, 113 Dickens, Charles, 55 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 20 digital mapping, 116–17 distribution of the sensible, x, xi, 84, 99, 101, 103, 106 Dōgen, 8 Doha, Qatar, 147 Douglas, Mawson, 34 Drobnick, Jim: the poetry of existence, 210 dual cities, 92 Durham, 60, 78, 146. See also Lumiere Eclipse (Amadou and Mariam), 205–7 Edinburgh, 186; Holyrood Park, 195–96. See also Speed of Light Edison, Thomas, 169 Ekirch, Roger, 82, 166, 167, 171–72 Elcott, Noam: on darkness, 175 Elias, Norbert: civilizing process, 187 Enchanted Forest (Scotland), 120–23, 160 Enlightenment, 168–69, 170, 180 environmental art, 38 Europe, 29, 145, 171, 184, 190; cities, 54, 184 Evans, Martyn: wonder, 124 eventification, 111, 114 everyday life, viii, 53, 63, 158, 166 festivals, 72; and carnivals, 113; festivalization, 111; light, xii, 110–11, 125–37, 139; spatial functionalities, 115, 124–25, 140, 150–51, 160, 216–17; urban arts, 111–14

243

Fête de Blé, 148 Fête des Lumières, 59–60, 110, 116, 125–26 Florida, Richard: creative class, 97, 111 Foucault, Michel, 169 Freeberg, Ernest: “City Beautiful” campaigners, 58; colonial revivalists, 74–75; electric illumination, 84, 180 Galaxia III (Rose), 123–24 Gallan, Ben: dualisms, 183; overillumination, 57 Gallaway, Terrel: on the night sky, 181 Gargunnock Hills (Scotland), 14–15 Garnert, Jan: representations of midnight, 37–38 gas light, 55, 56, 88–89 geographical inequality, 90 German Pavilion (Barcelona), 45–46 Ghana, 215 glare, 57. See also skyglow Glasgow, 86 Gleber, Anke, 53 Glen Trool, 190–95 Gotham, Kevin Fox: carnival mask, 112; hegemonic ideologies, 113 Graffiti Research Lab (LTS), 64 Grynsztejn, Madeleine: on Eliasson’s work, 9 habitual practices, 100 Hamadoun, Tandina, 206 Haussmann, Baron, 83 Healy, Stephen, 102, 145 Heelas, Paul: New Age religious beliefs, 171 Hera, 24 Hermit’s Grotto, 175 Hindu rituals, 93 Hoi An, 130

244 Index iconic settings, 91 Illuminasia, 70–72 impressionist painters, 25, 36 India: Bihar, 93; cities, 84; rural, 93, 176; urban, 184, 215 Ingold, Tim: affectivity to the sensible world, 7; temporalities, 12, 17, 18–20, 22, 25, 28 installations, xii, 9, 27, 34, 39, 47, 49, 58; illuminated, 68, 69, 72, 79, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 98, 105, 106, 114, 118, 123, 127, 132, 134, 135–36, 139, 148–49, 151, 154–56, 159–60, 161, 186, 190, 207, 216; temporary, 63, 65–66 International Dark Sky Association, 57, 180–81, 190 ION Orchard Shopping Mall, 102 Iraq, invasion of, 87–88 Isenstadt, Sandy: linguistic particles, 91, 198 Islam, 24; art, 44 Istanbul, 75 Jakle, John: nocturnal blandscapes, 56–57, 90 Jakob, Doreen: eventification, 111 John Rylands Library, 185 Jordan, 159 Jouons avec les temps (Gauthé), 116 Julie, Guy: urban designscapes, 97, 112 Junichiro, Tanizaki: electric illumination, 58, 176–77 Kahn, Louis, 46 Kersalé, Yann, 68–69 Kielder Forest, 19, 22, 30, 31. See also Skyspace Kojo Moe, 78 Koslofsky, Craig: on street lighting, 54, 83; new margins of exclusion, 89,

109; nocturnalisation, 165, 168, 170–71, 172 Krajina, Zlatan: ethnographic study, 106 Kremlin, 85, 160 Lamp for Mary, 66–68 Las Vegas, 75 La Tour de Soleil, 85, 214 Le Corbusier, 45 LED, 57, 58, 60, 61–62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 70, 77, 101, 102, 105, 118, 127, 128, 134, 158, 160 Lefebvre, Henri: importance of rhythms, 30; quotidian, 99 Light Castle (Salmela and Turunen), 72 light: designers, x, xi, xiv, 53, 60, 63, 72–73, 102, 137, 144, 145, 182, 185, 215, 216; installations, 65–69, 72, 114, 161, 190; “Light Discipline,” 87–88 Lighting Urban Community International, 59 Lightning Field (De Maria), 38–39 liminoid, 115 Lingis, Alphonso, 12–13; changing levels of light, 14 Lloyd, Jones, 200 Loi Krathong, 72, 110, 130 London, 55; Dans le Noir?, 203–5, 210; darkest, 84, 169; nightscape, 56; Olympic ceremony, 147, 154–56, 173, 174, 175, 177–78; Trafalgar Square, 146; Victorian, 88, 109 Lorimer, Hayden, 195–96 Los Angeles, 33, 65–66 Lumiere, 117–18, 128, 148 Luminous Nights, 63 Lyon, 60, 126; opera house, 68–69. See also Fête des Lumières MacFarlane, Robert, 192–93 Macpherson, Hannah, 18, 193, 202

Index Macula, 126–27 Maeshowe, Orkney, 23 Magdalene laundries, 127–28 Major, Mark: illegibility of London’s nightscape, 56 Manhattanhenge (Wasserman), 39–41 Manual for Streets (document), 101 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 169 Massumi, Brian: transpersonal or prepersonal intensities, 142 materialities, 11, 29, 41, 46, 142, 143, 145–46, 151, 160 Matusiak, Barbara: on Nordic light, 37 McDermott Baxter Light Art, 34 McKim, Joel, 111, 112 McQuire, Scott: new map of the city, 89, 104, 110; perceptual laboratory, 55 medieval: Europe, 145; festivals and carnivals, 113, 115, 137; times, 43, 88, 167; town, 166, 171, 185, 187 Mediterranean Sea, 29; cities, 183; skies, 45 Melbin, Murray: on artificial illumination, 54; illumination as a form of colonization, 165 Melbourne, 127–28, 150 Millennium Park, 39, 110 Miles, Mellissa: Australian sunlight, 35 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 168 MIMMI (Minneapolis Interactive MacroMood Installation), 69 Minority Report (film), 103–4 Model for a Timeless Garden (Eliasson), 4, 7–10, 17 modern: city, 55, 56, 90, 104, 137, 174; times, 44, 172 modernist, xiii, 29; architects, 44–46; discourses, 165; form 40–41; notions, 217; sculptures, 118; thought, 189

245

Mojave Desert, 86 Monet, Claude, 25–26 Montreal, Quartier des spectacles, 111 Moonraking Festival, 130–31 Morris, Nina: human bodies and landscapes interaction, 11, 182; on NVA’s event, 186 Nasaw, David: new landscape of modernity, 54–55 national landscape ideologies, 35, 182 neoliberal: agendas, 215; light festivals, xii, 131, 137; politics, 110–11; programs, 92; strategies, 112 neon, 54, 68, 70, 75, 134, 153 neo-pagan, groups rituals, 24 Neumann, Dietrich: artistic medium, 54, 92 Nevada desert, 35 new lighting technologies, 61, 136 New York City, 39; blackouts, 178–79, 180, 189; Central Park, 201, 203; Dialogue in the Dark, 201; Luna Park, 70, 110; McGraw Hill Building, 118, 173–74; Singer building, 90; Times Square, vii, 91–92, 101, 103, 202 nocturnal: activity, 82; atmospheres, 111; city, 55, 82, 172, 195, 214; creatures, 6; environment, 53, 60, 64, 181, 183, 190; experience, 34, 167; habitat, 181; illumination, 169; landscape, 12, 88, 92, 102, 176, 186, 189, 197; public morality, 82; risks, 166; sites of socialization, 54; space, xiii, 64, 66, 82, 101, 124, 148, 198, 199, 200, 216, 218; sublime, 173, 174, 189; values, 170 nocturnalisation, 165 nonvisual apprehension, 13–14 Nordic: architects, vii; identity, 36;

246

Index

landscapes, 38; light, 34, 37, 46–49; nations, 36; paintings, 37 North Atlantic Drift, 32 Norway, 33–34 Nuit Blanche festival, 111–12, 113, 171 Nuremberg, Nazi rallies in, 93, 154 Nye, David, 54; lighting systems, 90, 177–78, 179, 180 Nyx, 23–24 Otter, Chris: on electric illumination, 55–56, 74; urban differentiation, 88; on Victorian England, 83–84 Pallasmaa, Juhani: on Nordic paintings, 37, 209 Palmer, Bryan, 84, 172, 173–74 Paris, 69, 75, 82–83; Eiffel Tower, 85; gas lighting, 88, 109, 174, 184 Parthenon, 187 passive spectatorship, 114 patterns, on plumage, 17 Petty, Margaret, 65; American domestic lighting, 94, 114 phenomenological: aspects, 22, 23; focus, 4; integration, 24, 26, 39, 41, 45 Picard, David, 111, 125, 129, 135–36 Pink, Sarah: everyday illuminated atmospheres, 157–58 Piper, John: on Reformation, 43 place: identity, 35, 129; making, x, 97, 114–15, 125, 129, 137, 216; sense of, vii, xi, xii, 27, 31, 47, 64, 65, 110, 114, 129, 131, 150, 167, 203, 216 plein air painting, practice of, 37 Plummer, Henry: modern turn to light, 46; Nordic light, 46–47, 49; on Nordic nations, 36–37 post-structuralist studies, 4 Poulsen, Esben: patterns of human mobility, 62

power relations, 81, 114 pre-Raphaelite art, 44 Quinn, Bernadette, 111, 112–13 Rancière, Jacques: distribution of the sensible, x, 99 religious art, 42 Riley, Bridget, 123 River That Flows Both Ways, The (Finch), 39 Robinson, James: on camouflage, 87 Rocky Mount, 89 Rome: Forum, 187; Pantheon, 41–42 Rose, Mitch: cultural interpretations of landscape, 22 Rundle Lantern, 104–6 Rycroft, Simon: vitality of the material world, 6–7, 123 Sabah, Malaysia: tropical light, 38 Saint-Pierre Cathedral (Nantes), 69 Salford, Ordsall Hall, 176 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang: disenchanted night, 53–55, 82–83; lighting of festivity, 109, 156–57; modern cities, 166; on train travel, 197, 198 Schlör, Joachim, 55; on Paris blackouts, 75, 88–89, 184 Scotland, 14, 31–32, 120, 186, 190 Seamon, David: place ballets, 28 Seitinger, Susanne: light bodies, 63–64 Seurat, George: chromoluminarism, 25 Shanghai, 91 Sharpe, William, 172, 173–74 Shaw, Rob, 86, 101, 210 Skagen, 37 Skeggs, Beverley: symbolic economy of class conflict, 98 skyglow, 57 Skyspace (Turrell), 19–22, 30–31 Slaatta, Tore: experimental digital architecture, 103

Index Social Light Movement, 72–74 Solnit, Rebecca: on the perceptual and the symbolic, 22–23 Soltani, Amir, 104 Sorensen, Roy, 8, 202 Soviet Union, 92 spatial horizontalism, 18 Spectra (Ikeda), 154–56, 161 Speed of Light (NVA), 186, 187, 195, 196 SPOTS (installation), 65 stained glass, technologies, 43–44, 103, 157 Starpath (product), 64 Stephens, Angharad Closs: feelings of togetherness, 147 Stevens, Quentin: on urban festivals, 112, 136 Stonehenge, 23 Storr: Unfolding Landscape, The (NVA), 186 Strang, Veronica: materiality of the world, 23 sublime: astronomical, 181, 182; industrial, 78, 86, 97; light, 35, 39; nocturnal, 173; power, 42; sense of the, 10, 24–25 Subluminal, 185 Submarine Caves, 175 Sunderland rail station, 66 surveillance, 81–82, 83; hypersurveillance, 86; surveillance-saturated dystopia, 104, 113, 145, 172, 183, 192, 214; systems of, 85 Susik, Abigail, 64; technological innovations, 103, 116 Sydney, 34, 63, 66, 134; Luna Park, 70. See also VIVID Light Festival Symphony of Lights, 65, 114 Tallmadge, John: dominance of visual apprehension, 193 Taoist meditation, 171

247

Terra Incognita (McDermott Baxter Light Art), 34 Thibaud, Jean Paul: pervasive quality, 141, 143–45 This Variation (Seghal), 207–8, 210 Tilley, Christopher, 38 Tokyo, Tower of Wind, 68, 91 topophilia, 131, 149 Toronto, 118, 171. See also Nuit Blanche festival Tourlentes, Stephen: photographs of American prisons, 86 TRANSITION, 74 travel literature, 35, 41, 49 Tromsø, Norway, 34 tropics, 30, 200 Tuan, Yi-Fu: on collective belonging 131, 149; types of primordial chaos, 170 Turner, J. M. W., 25; prize, viii United Kingdom, 29, 95, 101; economy, 111, 154, 159–60, 176 unreflexive practices, 27 urban America, 89–90, 169 Urban Light (Burden), 65–66, 160 Urban Tree Project (Ample Projects), 128 van Dyke, Chris: short-lived events, 12; spatial and historical contingencies, 22 Vannini, Philip: techniques for everyday living, 28, 159, 185 Vasseleau, Cathryn: field of vision, 41; tactility, 14 Vauxhall Gardens, 175 VE Day, 146, 178 vernacular, xi, 39, 58, 59, 65, 69, 72, 74, 79, 97, 102, 110, 114, 139, 144, 215–17 Victorian England, 83–84, 176; era, 157; London, 88; novelists, 174 Vienna, 83, 174

248

Index

VIVID Light Festival, 34, 110, 123, 128, 131–36, 151 Wagenfeld, Malte, 19 Warsaw, Poland, 75, 85 Wasserman, Andrew, 40–41 Weightman, Barbara, 23, 24 Welton, Martin: luminous super­ abundance, 208–9 Western: culture, 165; Europe, 42, 184 Western Highlands (Scotland), 32–33 Williams, Raymond: structures of feeling, 161

Williams, Robert: cloak of darkness, 85; on Night spaces, 170 Wise, Amanda: convivial multiculture, 151 Work No. 227: The lights going on and off (Creed), viii Wylie, John, 4; lack of separation, 10; landscape of visible things, 192; visual apprehension, 14 Young, Dianna: synaesthetic effects, 4, 7

Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is author of Tourists at the Taj; National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life; and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality, as well as editor of Geographies of Rhythm and coeditor of Spaces of Vernacular Creativity and Urban Theory beyond the West: A World of Cities. He was formerly editor of Tourist Studies and has written on walking, driving, football cultures, and urban materiality.