NOTE
Basic manifesto “Let there be light - but let it be of a good quality, and let it not be excessive. And let there be dark.” (excessive, standardized low quality lighting is engendering a growing disenchantment with the over illuminated world.)
First, encountered this Yelp review of a prospective park visit location:
Walking through this park was an unexpected treat, there was a lot more here than I imagined. It’s too bad the weather was barely 3 stars today and even worst that the autumn foliage isn’t up to par (at least yet) - maybe 1 star for foliage.
This UK art piece “Skyspace” is studied (fundamentally a skylight).
skyspace detaches light in the sky, isolates an integral element of everyday experience. the sky is no longer the neutral background of things, it is no long around or just above us but is exactly on top of us.
We have a skylight in our house at the top floors and my parents have had a fundamentally different understanding of the progression of the day from that, compared to my space. Same with my office at work. I need to walk to even know anything about the outside world.
Rebecca Solnit quote:
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 rainges, of anything far away. That color is the color of an emotion, of solitude and desire. The color there seen from here, where you are not, and the color of where you can never go
Some shadow thoughts: While reading I’m thinking a planet where shadows are imaginative transformative property turns the ordered plan into those chaotic spires from WoW cosmology. A decayed tooth turned, sharp jagged like a fang. A spired city by night only.
The Hudson River was originally called Muhheakantuck, which means “the river that flows both ways.” I was recently reading Hudson’s boat was called Halve Maen, anglicized “half moon” (probably because if you look at it, appears a crescent).
Lighting constantly comes up at lab addresses. It gets dark here at night, and the lab is beholden to rules in place by the local “rich” folk and harbor aesthetics to maintain control. (The historic harbor wall had a multi-year restoration that I mentioned, where they cleaned each original stone)
Uneven advancement
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What follows is the part I wanted to talk about In modern life:
Darkness transformed from primordial presence to manageable aspect of life In the nocturnal city distances can be difficult to ascertain. Illuminated buildings appear to float amid gloom, areas of darkness are impregnable to making sense and become sites for speculation and scale. The modern city becomes a perceptual lab, an oneiric city, exhilarating and disorientating to its inhabits and as a space open to fantasy, transgression and experimenting inhabitants.
Here (talking about candle → gas to electric lighting but I am making it more broad:
Night was made visually complex in its illumination because of the various overlapping technologies, successive tech improvements left no dominant approach to lighting producing “a teeming muddled multiplicity of visual practices that cannot be reduced to one hegemonic modality
Light and shadow are thought of last, if at all for these owners.
But some mourn - where once people moved between dark and illuminated areas which experience has been replaced by a uniform glare. The dreamlike fantastic is now a homogenous wash of light spread across space.
So this is interesting. You can picture a city street where each shop in the block has their own manner of lighting.
Is this good or bad? There’s no cohesion to it. It’s basically a bunch of different light techs organically placed by need (besides street lamps, which regularity might impose some order).
I’m thinking of it like a spectral and relatively unnoticed kowloon walled city, or maybe even the modern web (in the sense it’s just this shape/network growing by need on itself) Contrary to Laurel Hollow rulings, prevailing elsewhere light and shadow seems to be this uncontrolled, physical aesthetic space.
I wonder if the urban fantasy genre, and all of these are capturing/narrativizing some essence of what is happening here. At night how things are transformed by this heterogenous lighting of different independent actors and technologies.
Dialogue in the Dark
Dialogue in the Dark is one of the world’s most exciting life-changing experiences where visitors are guided by blind guides in absolute darkness. You get the chance to experience daily environments from a completely new perspective, when you enjoy a walk in the park, take a boat cruise or visit a café in our specially designed darkened rooms. Daily routines become exciting and a reversal of role is created where sighted become blind and blind become sighted.