Emission theory or as it is sometimes called extramission, extromission, or extromittism theory, is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by beams emitted by the eyes. I was reminded of this when looking at an old poster for the International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911 and another series of corona virus connections started to form in my head. As I'm locked down and not allowed to go out and talk to anyone about these thoughts, I'm afraid they are coming out as a blog post again. There is a sort of method in my madness, I'm still trying to communicate something about how artists think. My thinking starts with seeing something and it is through analogy and metaphor that that initial perception grows into an idea for an art piece. You could look at what I'm doing as an aspect of artist's research as opposed to or in contrast to academic research, i.e. intuitively skipping from thought to thought, rather than objectively analysing data and verifying sources.
The International Hygiene Exhibition was a world's fair exhibition that was focused on medicine and public health. Hygiene centred around cleanliness was in 1911 still a very new idea, an idea that was at the time influencing many other areas of public life, not least art and design. It was one of the driving forces behind the Modernist obsession with clean white walls and uncluttered surfaces, germs could hide in decoration, but not on the clean, flat surfaces of abstract machined objects. It has been argued that the abstract art made for Modernist interior spaces was therefore made as a direct consequence of the new awareness of hygiene. It was only in 1847 that the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelwis when investigating childbed fever, found students who assisted in childbirth often did so immediately after conducting autopsies. He instituted a strict hand washing policy, and deaths from childbed fever very quickly diminished. A few years later, another physician, John Snow realised that London outbreaks of cholera seemed to be clustered around a particular water pump, on removing the pump handle, the spread was instantly contained. He had already recommended that water be "filtered and boiled before it is used" But Snow's 'germ' theory of disease was not widely accepted until the 1860s, when the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch became more widely known. Pasteur had placed a drop of blood from a sheep dying of anthrax into a sterile culture, and allowed the bacilli to grow. He repeated this process until none of the original culture remained in the final dish. The final culture produced anthrax when injected into sheep, showing that the bacillus was responsible for the disease. It was Joseph Lister that worked out the implications of these discoveries and in the 1860s he introduced the idea of sterile surgery, using carbolic acid as an antiseptic to sterilise surgical instruments. As you can see from this very short introduction to the need for cleanliness in hygiene, by 1911 the idea of invisible germs had taken hold, (it was not until the 1940s that the electron microscope was developed and a virus was seen for the first time) and the existence of a powerful but unseen agent was now seen as a reality that could be effectively dealt with by sterilisation and cleanliness. The word 'hygiene' like many made up words comes from the Greek, and entered English via France in the late 17th century. Hygeia was the Greek goddess of health, daughter of Aesculapius the god of medicine. Statues of Hygieia were during certain rituals covered by women's hair and articles of clothing, but to what effect I'm not sure. She is also often depicted feeding a large snake, a creature she no doubt inherited from her father.
Hygeia goddess of health
Aesculapius the god of medicine always carries a staff entwined by a snake. The significance of this is complex. Partly a symbol of renewal, or rejuvenation, (snakes shed their skin) it is also a symbol of life and death, healing implies illness, this ambiguity reflected in the ancient Greek word 'pharmakon' meaning both 'drug' and 'poison'. Snake venom was often prescribed at the time as a healing elixir, something that might have been a little like the use of peyote or ayahuasca, vomiting and hallucinogenic experiences purging both the mind and the body. The old 'snake-oil' salesmen were still in existence at the end of the 19th century, a common belief in many cultures was that snakes boiled in oil, formed the basis of a powerful cure all remedy.
Staff of Aesculapius
Because of the new focus on cleanliness, the great hygiene exhibition of 1911 was sponsored and organised by the German businessman and wealthy owner of the company that manufactured Odol mouthwash, he was of course eager to educate the public about advances in public health procedures, especially if they included mouth hygiene.
Our present obsession with sparkling teeth is still served by Odol, and if you look carefully at the label you can see a radiating gleam of freshness, a sparkle that people now want to enable them to take smiling selfies and which is used to advertise the whitest of white teeth. That educational investment into oral hygiene that the wealthy owner of the Odol company took back in 1911 has really paid dividends.
The gleam that radiates out is of course taken from that most important symbol of life and goodness, the sun. Its rays illuminate everything and are a source of all wellbeing and life. Solar deities, sun gods and sun worship can be found throughout recorded history. Even Christmas Day being on the 25th of December is on that date because early Christians needed to replace the festival of Sol Invictus with a celebration of their own. The rays of the sun were seen by neolithic peoples in Britain and Ireland as being very special, and on certain days they would be seen to enter sacred sites as moments of spiritual illumination. Witness the continuing mythic power of Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland.
Rays of the sun penetrate Newgrange
Invisible rays pass through us all the time, Euclid and Ptolemy both claimed that vision worked by little flames exiting the eyes, traveling on rays, scanning objects in the visual field, and traveling back to the eyes to report what they had detected. (Somewhat like Superman's heat and x-ray vision) This would seem to me to be little different to Jack Kirby's idea of the Fantastic Four being penetrated by cosmic rays, these invisible rays affecting their body chemistry in strange and fantastic ways, metamorphosing them into new super beings.
The origin of Marvel Comic's the Fantastic Four
Invisible penetration by rays is miraculous and transformative; something that radiates out from supernatural beings or entities. At the moment of the Annunciation, Mary is in effect made pregnant by God. In the painting by Fra Angelico below, God is represented by the sun, the rays of which penetrate Mary. The Feast of the Annunciation is on the 25th of march, an approximate date for the northern vernal equinox, nine months before Christmas Day, the ceremonial birthday of Jesus.
The Annunciation: Fra Angelico
Once Mary is changed by God's penetration, 'the immaculate conception'; she is herself elevated into the status of a divine being and she can also emit transforming rays.
Mary as the mediatrix, or mediator between humans and the divinity
Rays of light appear to radiate from Mary's hands, an alternative extramission theory, touch from a distance, one that has also been seen in comic books. If the good and pure can radiate healing energies, evil villains can too, Dr. Doom radiating destructive energy from his hands, another comic-book human altered by cosmic rays, but this time with a mind focused on destruction.
The eye in the poster for the hygiene exhibition, is meant to represent the all seeing eye; 'the Eye of Providence'. Based on the idea of the all-seeing eye of God, the rays of light emanating from the eye in the past represented the eye of God watching over humanity, in this case the poster is now meant to suggest hygiene has replaced divine providence. Science superseding religion as humankind's saviour, is now watching over humanity and it is the role of business to provide the necessary services and goods to ensure that these benefits are made available to all.
The Eye of Providence as printed on the American dollar bill
Emission theory, or the idea that seeing is accomplished by beams emanating from the eye, continues to exist as a powerful idea, although proven by science many years ago to be a redundant theory, it still works as a concept and lies behind many of the ways we think about things intuitively.
Emission theory is as a concept closely tied to the idea of the sunburst. Invisible rays spread out from a defined centre. God has been described many times as the centre of a sphere, as in this typical ancient explication; “God is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” God and the sun were for thousands of years and across many cultures one and the same thing. Science tells us that the universe explodes into existence from a single point, a big bang, the effects of which we inhabit now.
A graphic representation of sunburst
A graphic representation of the mutation and spread of a virus
Graphic representation of the big bang
God sees everything, the all seeing eye's extramission vision like Superman's, can pass through everything, but if one invisible entity can do this perhaps others can too. Our greatest fear at the moment is corona virus, the invisible demon is spread amongst us, not so much by rays emanating from the eyes but by invisible droplets coming from a sneeze.
In science the great unknowns are at the moment dark matter and dark energy, we have been living amongst these things from the beginning of time, the known universe we now know to only be about 5% of what is out there. We are constantly penetrated by the dark rays of unknown forces, in the past we used various religious or spiritual understandings to cope with the fact that death sometimes arrived out of nowhere, and whoever we were we could not avoid it. The present corona pandemic is just one tiny moment in the long history of our interrelationship with a dangerous natural environment, that has nevertheless also been an environment that we have grown up in and with which we are inextricably entangled. It is as good as it is bad. Like the light rays from our sun, darkness can spread out from a centre, this darkness can be mental as well as physical, but however it manifests itself it is part of life and we should embrace it.
Dark energy emanates out from a centre
Schematic representation of a corona virus
Two images from a recent series of my own drawings
Polar opposite: From a series of drawings of fast disappearing animals
In my last post about sub-atomic particles and drawing, I was hedging around having to try and explain what is normally called quantum theory. So once again I’m going to have a go at trying to communicate what I think a complex scientific principle is and explain how I am trying to use my personal awareness of it (awareness rather than understanding, because I don’t think I have a hope in Hell of really understanding it), to inform my approach to making and thinking about drawing.
Quantum theory sets out an explanation of the nature and behaviour of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level. Its history is very interesting because as different scientists have attempted to explain it, our understanding of things such as energy, radiation, mass and matter have needed to change.
Right at the beginning of the twentieth century the physicist Max Planck first developed a quantum theory. He had set out to understand why radiation from a glowing body changes in colour as it gets hotter. We have all seen this when heating metal, it gets red, then orange, then yellow and then if you can heat it up far enough, it can get to be a blue colour. Think of our sun, this emits radiation and it’s yellow, but if we are in in the DC fictional universe, Superman comes from Krypton, a planet that circles a red sun that must have been cooler. But what is radiation? In Planck’s time it was thought to be a constant electromagnetic wave, but he couldn’t get the maths right when applying that idea to the reason for the change in colours. So he decided to think about the emission of individual units of energy, which he called ‘quanta’. Quanta being a term that covers all sorts of energy, a photon being a quantum of the electromagnetic radiation that we associate with light. (‘Quanta’ is the plural form of ‘quantum’) What had been sorted out during the previous century was that electricity, magnetism and light were all different sorts of electromagnetic radiation and we are now aware that there are waves of energy moving all around us in the form of TV and audio transmissions, gamma radiation from space, light and heat in the atmosphere, x-rays etc. Scientists understand them all as electromagnetic radiation, their waves of energy being called electromagnetic because they have oscillating electric and magnetic fields.
But we need to go back in time a little to sort out how these what appear to be very different things were seen to be all related.
But first of all there is that diagram that I’m sure many of you have seen before that shows how the various types of electromagnetic field are related. The visible light spectrum is enlarged because it is the one most important to us.
Electromagnetic spectrum
It was James Clark Maxwell who first unified the fields of electricity, magnetism and optics. He described light as a propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields. My understanding of propagating is that it refers to something’s ability to transmit something, or bring something forth (like a new plant) in this case light, through a medium. So this particular wave carries light, whilst others carry for instance radio waves. But I also think this is a problem with words, I cant see how a field can also be a propagating wave through a medium, unless the field is its own medium, within which the photon moves.
I think it is reasonably easy to visualise the relationship between electricity and magnetism because we have all seen experiments such as the moving of a magnet over a wire to induce an electric current. The one seems to be caused by the other and vice versa.
Maxwell relied on Faraday’s visualisation of magnetic and electrical forces as being like fields that extend into space. These fields allow for the transmission of forces to other charges. Such as in a magnet positively charged elements will head towards a negative charge.
Faraday visualised electric charges as producing fieldsthat extend through space and which transmit electric and magnetic forces to other distant charges. But he had to visualise a field, so I can sort of see another word based problem. I think of farmers’ fields as extending to two dimensions, but these ‘fields’ must be far more complicated than that. So how did Faraday think of fields? The term was originally used in mathematics to represent any physical quantity whose value changes from one point in space to another. So and I’m sure I will have got this wrong, if I want to measure the average temperature of lets say a brick, there would be lots of different temperatures to measure, all of which would be contributing to something I could call the overall temperature. For instance a point in shadow near the brick’s surface might be cooler than another point in full sunlight, but colder than a point near the bottom of the brick. This would mean that I am specifying a distribution of numbers, one for each spatial point. The temperature “field” would therefore be an accounting of those numbers. As a visual person, I could visualise this as a three-dimensional graph, having x, y and x axes. In this way I could think about a field as an expression of the spatial coordinates. The temperature would however be constantly changing, the brick being much colder at night, so the field would also vary with time. If a field is expressed as a function of spatial coordinates together with time it would look like this as an equation; T(x, y, z, t), where T is the temperature field, x, y, and z are the spatial coordinates, and t is the time. But electrical fields flow and bricks don’t.
How to plot a vector within three dimensional axes
Plotting velocities using vectors
Using vectors to visualise changes in a fluid
If you want to work out the mathematics of things that move, you use vectors, because if things are moving they don’t have a fixed position, but they do have magnitude and direction at each point in space as they move. When measuring the temperature of the brick we were using ascalar method or way of measuring a fixed single measurable entity. A bit like using bit maps to draw with on a computer instead of vector graphics. Vector graphics are comprised of paths, which are defined by start and end points. (See this earlier post) Because they are not made up of a specific number of dots, they can be scaled to a larger size and not lose any image quality. I know it might feel that I’m drifting off the point here but bare with me, because from what I can see so much of what science at this level is about is metaphor, trying to grasp something by thinking about something else, so I’m following my nose again and thinking about something else. Unlike raster graphics, vector images are not resolution-dependent. But I feel that I am resolution dependent, in the sense that my scale sits between the tiny sub atomic and the vast operation of stars like the sun. Vector images have no fixed intrinsic resolution, they display at the resolution capability of whatever output devices (monitors or printers) are rendering them. So are vector images a way of thinking about how electromagnetic and other energy fields can operate at both microscopic and cosmic scales? Am I in effect when I try to think of my day to day operation in the world as I think I see it, more like a raster graphic, having to hold on to the contents of millions of tiny bits of information, rather than being shaped by an idea of an energy field, an idea that can be applied at both macro and micro levels. Is this why everything around me gets fuzzy edges when I begin to look closely at them?
“It’s not what it is but where it is”, was a favourite phrase of myself and other drawing tutors during the time I was teaching students to draw from observation. Drawing accurately was about searching for points in space. Drawing with an attention to your perceptual awareness within this process was about recognising how eye and body movement caused a constant repositioning of relationships, therefore all you could actually draw was the record of the search for something that could by definition never be found. When you are looking to measure movement in space, a vector can deal with speed, as well as direction, something that I had not really thought about when undertaking those now distant drawing classes. The speed of the two eyes’ sweep through a space and of their scan of the objects and their relationships was not something we considered, it was simply taken for granted that a constant oscillation of movement was the actual state within which the situation of looking existed. We did not treat the world as something that consisted of static lumps, but we did ask questions, such as how can mass be visualised on a flat surface? Giacometti was the artist often cited as being someone who understood these things.
Giacometti
Going back to the world of mathematics, if instead of the brick we decide to measure the changing temperatures of a fluid in motion, such as in a flowing stream, or going back to that old life studio, changes in temperature in the air in a room, we would need to use vectors.
What I find interesting at this point is that by trying to understand what is going on I’m becoming more aware of how important it is that I’m always in motion, and if I step back from the world a little, I can see that everything else is in motion too. There is a wonderful Sam Taylor Wood video of a still life that reveals that a still life is in fact never still.
Sam Taylor Wood: Still life
When particles interact, their wavefunctions briefly overlap and when this happens these particles are forever linked, and they change their nature, a single wavefunction describing both particles simultaneously, in a process known as "quantum entanglement". When a measurement is taken, it triggers a series of entanglements beginning with the first particle hitting a detector, and ending with molecules shifting around in the brain of the observer to make them consciously aware of what just happened. However every particle in the universe becomes entangled with every other particle, leading to a single universal wavefunction that describes the entirety of the universe. This seems to me to have a direct parallel with looking. As you look what in word descriptions were objects (chairs, carpets, tea cups, plates etc.) become transformed into a single entanglement of shifting light. Scanning eyes picking up a small percentage of this and a brain/body trying to interpret this conglomerate of light emissions in terms of its potential effect on the observer.
Sam Taylor Wood’s ‘still-life’ is of course about time and the reality is that time is a dimension that non scientists rarely think about at a quantum level. It could be that time is an emergent phenomenon resulting from entanglement, in which different quantum particles effectively share an existence, even though physically separated, so that the quantum state of each particle can only be described relative to the other entangled particles. This entanglement, does seem to keep re-occurring, just as a photon is not a separate particle, it is a flux in an energy field, it is what happens when I take away things and let processes take over.
A never stillness seems to lie behind the way to think about everything, so I think I need to return to science again. The relationship between optics and electromagnetism is a fundamental one and central to what it means to be a visual artist because vision is itself something that would never have developed if light had not existed. On Earth light from the sun provides energy for all living things, it fact it could be argued that we are just a very strange physical form of the Sun's energy. So how does the Sun produce light?
The Sun mainly consists of plasma. Plasma is sometimes called the forth state of matter, (solid, liquid, gas and plasma) and is called plasma because Irving Langmuir who was the first scientist to name it, thought it reminded him of "the way blood plasma carries red and white corpuscles and germs". The Latin word plasma was taken from the Greek and meant 'something formed', 'a mouldable substance' or 'jelly', and although I have to keep reminding myself of how words trap you into thinking about things in a certain way, I think this is a useful metaphor to hold on to. In our blood it is the carrier for vital ingredients such as cells and proteins around the body. In the Sun, plasma is in constant movement and acts as both a carrier and emitter of radiation.
In the Sun’s core energy is produced by hydrogen atoms being converted into the nuclei of helium. This is actually what is happening when plasma, which occurs when an ionized gaseous substance, in this case hydrogen, becomes highly electrically conductive to the point that long-range electric and magnetic fields dominate the behaviour of the matter. This is possible thanks to the extreme pressure and temperature that exists within the core. The fusion of four protons (hydrogen nuclei) into one alpha particle, two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle that is identical to a helium nucleus, releases two positrons, as well as two neutrinos (which changes two of the protons into neutrons), and energy. This energy is electromagnetic and works its way through the Sun’s outer layers getting less powerful as it does so, finally getting to the surface, where it leaves the Sun in the form of radiation. I.e. energy travelling as rays.
The sun emits all of the different kinds of electromagnetic radiation, (see the chart above) 99% of its rays are though in the form of visible light, ultraviolet rays, and infrared rays (what we call heat). Energy waves travel out from their source in straight lines, which is why they are also called rays. (These are Maxwell’s travelling harmonic waves) The confusion is that energy is sent out as a wave, even though it travels in straight lines, this is called the rectilinear propagation of light. But now I think it gets hard to think about. I have tended to think of photons as being particles of light, but now understand that there are no such things as particles, just bundles of energy, so a photon would bethe quantum of the electromagnetic field, or the force carrier or mover within the electromagnetic force. But it looks as if the scientists want to deal with it as both a particle and a wave. Again it’s a problem with words, if the situation is thought of as a certain moment in a series of events we call light, perhaps it’s easier to reconcile, but this does mean including time as a constant factor and therefore movement, in the way we think of everything.
It is as if our way of ‘knowing’ is being challenged, and my guess is that it has always been the case, because if there are so many energy states interpenetrating my existence, including the energy state that is myself, there must be a sort of built in awareness that allows me to navigate life, because I am just one example of a species that has developed out of many other species over millions of years. This could be very similar to the way that some birds navigate by being able to detect the nonlocal quantum signature of electromagnetic waves. The protein that apparently allows this to happen, it has been theorised, can be found in all living creatures that have evolved to move over distances. Perhaps this is something we have lost the ability to use, but which occasionally trips into our awareness. This could be why we hear echoes of things that aren’t there, intimations of other presences, or portents that drive us to make decisions about which we have no real understanding as to why, things that Janice Radway points to in her introduction to Avery F. Gordon’s ‘Ghostly Matters’, whereby she makes the point that we need to develop a way of negotiating between what we see and what we know and I would add what we feel or tacitly grasp to be the case. This shadow world is usually associated with the subconscious but perhaps this is the way things are, the subconscious being like the awareness of subatomic electromagnetic fields, more to do with being a process than a thing.
But here is the maths, here is the stuff that I’m also suspicious of, because of the way I think it suggests its own answers. In copying this information from the web I’ve tried to leave in the hyper-links so that you can follow the detail.
What Maxwell did was to show that electromagnetic waves describe propagating oscillations in the strengths of electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell’s wave equation showed that the speed of the waves, labeled c, is determined by a combination of constants in the laws of electrostatics and magnetostatics. This is the equation that demonstrates that this is the case:
Where ε0, the permittivityof free space, has an experimentally determined value of 8.85 × 10−12 square coulomb per newtonsquare metre, and μ0, the magnetic permeabilityof free space, has a value of 1.26 × 10−6 newton square seconds per square coulomb.
The calculated speed, about 3 × 108 metres per second, agreed with the known speed of light, and led Maxwell to conclude that, light itself—including radiant heat and other radiation, is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagatedthrough the electro-magnetic field according to electro-magnetic laws.
So here we have the bringing together of a whole series of things that previously were separate, and more recently spacetime itself has been described as a product of the entanglement between objects. It does appear as if gradually everything dissolves into everything else and if so, this helps me as a maker of images to think about their nature and how I try to control them or not, as they arrive. Whether I am drawing in three dimensions in clay or in two on paper, the same issues haunt me. How does the process itself reflect what it is to be alive, to be entangled in the now of existence and yet recognise links to the past and create a space within which to meditate upon possible futures? Conundrums indeed, but ones that are central to this type of thinking. Dualities seem to abound in contemporary thinking, not least the ones I used to find fascinating when I was reading Hegel.
Thinking of dualities the 'is light a particle or a wave?' issue became even more problematic when Heisenberg proved that precise, simultaneous measurement of the position and momentum of a subatomic particle was impossible. The more precisely one value is measured, the more flawed will be the measurement of the other value. This is the uncertainty principle, which became a very important part of what we now know as quantum theory.
The two interpretations of quantum theory that develop the implications of the uncertainty principle are the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds theory. Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which asserts that a particle is whatever it is measured to be (for example, a wave or a particle), but that it cannot be assumed to have specific properties, or even to exist, until it is measured. Bohr was therefore suggesting that objective reality does not exist. This translates to a principle called superposition that claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don't look to check. The analogy of Schrodinger's Catis often used to illustrate this idea. Place a live cat in a thick lead box, inside of which is an unbroken glass cyanide capsule and seal the box. We can’t know if the cat is alive or if the cyanide capsule has broken and the cat has died. Since we do not know, the cat is both dead and alive, according to quantum law, it is in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and see what condition the cat is in that the superposition is lost, and the cat must be either alive or dead.
Schrodinger's bears
Schrodinger put a cat in the box to test his theory, he was as human as the rest of us and was quite happy to use another animal instead of a human being. The problem is that we have been putting animals to the test for too many years. Our heavy use of pesticides now decimating the world's insect population, which could be seen as a very slow form of suicide. On the cosmic scale of things I doubt this matters, the Earth is a tiny mote within a universe far too large for us to comprehend. But if we look at anything closely enough it looks just like us and how would we think of a thought experiment of such dramatic possibilities if it was called Schrodinger's son.
The second interpretation of quantum theory is the many-worlds or multiverse theory. It holds that as soon as a potential exists for any object to be in any state, the universe of that object transmutes into a series of parallel universes equal to the number of possible states in which that the object can exist, with each universe containing a unique single possible state of that object. Furthermore, there is a mechanism for interaction between these universes that somehow permits all states to be accessible in some way and for all possible states to be affected in some manner.
This seems to me to be scientists trying to avoid the problem, perhaps what they are really saying is, 'we don’t know the answer'. The fact that all of this stuff only applies to the 5% of the universe that we can access, also suggests that when and if we begin to understand what the other 95% of dark matter and dark energy consists of, we may well find that everything is interconnected and that a common belief in ghosts and other such phenomena has roots in those somethings that we just feel are there but cant experience empirically.
Quantum vanitas
Which brings me back to drawing and drawing’s ability to take us places where logic doesn’t go. I’m not going to argue that drawing in some way taps into other possible worlds or existences, but I will suggest that what drawing can do is allow you to take flight, allow you to become lost in the absorbsion of doing and in that absorbsion perhaps you might be able to tap into fields of energy, in a way unavailable to words or mathematical equations. After all if bees, like dolphins can understand the concept of zero and use what seems like maths to solve problems, we may well have over estimated our skill base. Perhaps what we are missing is simply that bees are more perceptually attuned to magnetic or other fields and from their point of view we are bee-blind.
Diagram from an article looking at the map-like spatial memory of a bee, suggesting that a bee dance is like a drawing whereby they are mapping territory.
In my own work I often find I am wondering through space directed by something I'm unsure of. I believe that I am magnetically charged and in that charge sometimes I find a form.
Drawing in a quantum library
Artists looking to develop structures based on the implications of mathematical forms as indicated by this type of investigation often move into animation. Equilibrium by Memo Akten is a good example of this type of controlled response to the implications of mathematical possibilities.
References
If you want to read about birds and their ability to tap into magnetic fields, this is one of several articles on the subject: A Pauls, James & Zhang, Yiteng & Berman, G & Kais, Sabre. (2013). Quantum Coherence and Entanglement in the Avian Compass. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 87. 062704. 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.062704.
Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory: Find the article on honey bees here: Randolf Menzel, Uwe Greggers, Alan Smith, Sandra Berger, Robert Brandt,Sascha Brunke, Gesine Bundrock, Sandra Hülse, Tobias Plümpe, FrankSchaupp, Elke Schüttler, Silke Stach, Jan Stindt, Nicola Stollhoff, SebastianWatzl Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb 2005, 102 (8) 3040-3045; DOI:10.1073/pnas.0408550102
Because there is a neon
light workshop now available for drawing students, I thought it worthwhile to
just remind everyone that there is a long and continuing tradition of drawing
with light. The earliest records we have of this is in the building of megalithic
tombs and aligning them to the rising and setting of the sun.
The image above is of
light entering a tomb in Newgrange in Ireland. Once a year, at the winter
solstice, the rising sun shines directly along the long passage into the
burial chamber for about 17 minutes and illuminates the floor. Many cultures and periods of art history have
used light as a way to make images and define spaces, whether this is stained
glass in Christian churches or the Diwali Festival of Lights, all respond to the power and
spiritual associations we have when seeing light in darkness. Leeds itself has the tradition of Light Night and the 5th of November, 'Bonfire Night' is an excuse for everyone to try drawing images in the dark with fireworks.
There are iconic images of Picasso drawing with light in his studio. I particularly like this one, because of the peculiar colour range and the way that Picasso is gradually fading away, his work becoming what replaces him.
Picasso
Some artists have spent their whole career drawing with light, Anthony McCall in particular has explored the relationship between drawing, sculpture and installation with light drawings such as 'Between You and I'. His work not only draws in a space but it actually articulates how we experience space. His work Line Describing a Cone from 1973 is made from a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Mist from smoke machines gives the beam of light a greater density, making it appear almost tangible.
Anthony McCall: Between you and I
Carlo Bernardini uses laser installations to reveal the nature of architectural spaces.
Carlo Bernardini
Bernardini effects a sort of 'join the dots' sculptural experience, locating his laser driven 3D drawings between the main elements of any architectural structure. Lasers are now much more common and laser measuring devices have brought them into the home. You can use small mirrors to send beams around corners and create reasonably safe light environments. (Nb. I say reasonably safe because peoples eyes are very sensitive and you have to be vary careful that these beams are not going to take someone by surprise. Always check with H&S experts if you are going to try this).
Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza have been collaborating since 2010. They work using textiles and light projections. Transposition a site-specific installation consists of elastic ropes that are illuminated by software driven video projections and asks questions as to the relationship between the real and the virtual, audiences having to interact with the elastic ropes in order to shape and transform the projections.
Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza
Massimo Uberti states, "I like to create architectures of light, I employ neon tubes to build places for poetical inhabitants, trying to create dream-like spaces that allow for reflection." Again we have an artist that creates architecture within architecture, this time for poetic purposes and the creation of an image, rather than trying to explore the space and its properties as an end in its own right.
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Dan Flavin is the artist who introduced the neon tube into art during the early 1960s, as a Minimalist sculptural device, Bruce Nauman working at a similar time realised its potential as a conceptual tool. Since this time the neon has become more readily available and more importantly for a while cheaper to produce, until it became a go to material for a wide range of artists from Tracy Emin to Martin Creed. Most of these artists were of course using neon for its textual possibilities, the fact that it had to be seen in the dark was perhaps not as important as the fact it referenced commercial signage and was part of the aesthetic of the street at night.
Most of our images of neon are photographs, we are often consumers of second hand images via the printed or on screen image. Therefore it is no surprise that several artists who draw with light, specialise in photography, the actual event of the images making, sometimes being as important as the photograph that recorded the action.
Susan Sims-Hillbrand views her work as a performance and she refers to the end result as Spiritual Landscapes. “They are like a choreographed dance, movie or play on a single frame of film. They tell a story. Still today it fascinates me to know I am in the piece yet you never see me.”Working using film rather than digitally, Sims-Hillbrand draws her images using torches, working around the edges of people within long exposures, so that it appears that she is capturing the ghost of someone's presence.
Susan Sims-Hillbrand
Thomas Wilfred
The video above is from the 1930s and is by Thomas Wilfred an artist who coined the term "lumia" to describe "an eighth art" where light would stand on its own as an expressive art-form. As you can see working directly with light is nothing new, and Thomas Wilfred was aware of this, siting his work within a tradition of light as a spiritual response to the world, he often referred to Theosophy as a guiding principle, thus linking him to Mondrian and Kandinsky two other leading early Modernists who also followed Theosophy.
Working with light will always be associated with a sense of wonder. Seeing the world by moonlight as you walk home at night still feels like a special experience, we are still excited by firework displays and those glowing neons over high street shops are part and parcel of what it is to live in a 24 hour city. Artists are still called in by the church to respond to the old ideas of Christian spirituality and stained glass although an ancient craft can be renewed by more contemporary languages, Marc Chagall in particular was often brought in to design new windows. When I visited Chichester Cathedral during the summer I discovered a wonderful window designed by him.
Chagall stained glass
So whether you are using traditional craft skills or the latest laser projections you will be working within a long tradition of illuminating both the physical space and the mental condition of the various audiences that might encounter the work.
