Stonehouse - Light Art

ight is an important part of my Stonehouse project in many ways, and when thinking about this the production of light art occurred to me to fit well inside the main elements of this project.  Not only this but I have always found light art interesting, as it can produce some beautiful images, and is based on capturing an image over time.  This temporal element is particularly interesting as light art enables a person to see the trace of light that would not be visible to the naked eye, unveiling a hidden or invisible layer of information.  Light art can be produce images using uncontrolled light from the rest of the environment or the image can be painted in light to a set design by the artist.  Below are a couple of examples of this:

This is an image by Michael Bosanko, a light artist in South Wales who works with light art and light graffiti which is hand made to his own artistic specifications.

This is a simple long exposure image demonstrating the light art that can be produced just by environmental light sources such as passing cars.(https://www.newt.com/wohler/events/2008/hawaii/volcanoes-np/light-art-2-big.jpg)

Light art is mainly produced using long exposure cameras, in which the length of the exposure can be increased or decreased to collect more or less light information. However it is also possible to achieve a very limited form of light art using a standard camera, as if a camera is moving at the time it takes the image, the changes in the image during the capture time will also be in the picture.  Below is an image I took down at Stonehouse which has managed to capture an unintentional light art effect due to the movement of the camera:

However this unintentional form of light art does mean that the rest of the area is also blurry as it is captured the same way as the light.  I find this image I took most interesting as the light trace it has captured is oddly like the shape of a person, leaving an almost ghostly image, which there is very little obvious explanation to as the source is not visible. The real source was however likely to be a car headlight in the distance which was blurred this way due to the capture.

This concept of the light traces left behind in the environment is one that could be used in some way for the data or the projection itself.  If the projection could in some way draw the light traces that occurred in the environment previously or are occurring at the point in time of the projection it would provide the viewer with some kind of hidden history of the location.  In escence the projection would be able to unveil a hidden layer of the environment around the viewer. Being that the trace could not be placed exactly onto the surface where it occurred, but only on a 2D based projection, however it may be quite hard to get the meaning of the projection across to the viewer.