Adaptive Lighting Design – Staged Experiences of Light

Adaptive Lighting Design – Staged Experiences of Light

The two installations, White Cube and White Box, enable experience-based studies as a form of perceptual activity, wherein lighting conditions are examined in a dialectical exchange between the system and the people participating.

Adaptive lighting is based on a partial automation of the possibilities to adjust the colour tone and brightness levels of light in order to adapt to people’s needs and desires. Software can be seen to bear a communicative aesthetic, where the relation of user situations and the design intentions are controlled in ways that meaningfully adapt.

In the two installations, two different aspects are at play. In White Cube, the light colours are balanced. In White Box, the light follows the movements of the people in the space. In situations with several people occupying the same space, social relations become involved in the negotiations of how the lighting design unfolds.

Each installation stages a specified place, where participants perform their own experiences of being and moving in dynamically changing lighting settings. Through investigative actions participants test the ways that the lighting compositions influence their ability to orient themselves within the geography of the space and how the balances in light colours and luminous intensities affect their experience of directionality, distances, and scales. In short, the experience of being present in the space as well as one’s experience of relationships to other people in the space are staged and brought into focus.