Output details

'A Collected History of Light' exhibited in the Nostalgias exhibition (with associated international conference)

A Collected History of Light emerges from Michaela French’s ongoing practice-based research, which investigates the relationship between light, body and wonder. Combining theory and practice, French’s research utilises physical computing, data visualisation and digital imaging to create a series of light-based art works. These works visualise and re-frame the extraordinary inherent in the everyday in order to enable an expansion of perceptual awareness. A Collected History of Light seeks to elicit experiences of ‘wonder’ through the interactions between the body and light.

The artwork acts as an archive seeking to preserve the essence of place, time and experience through precisely recorded light samples. Light is central to human experience. It is constant, fundamental and panoptic, but we experience it as changeable and evocative of specific temporal locations. The subtleties of luminosity, intensity and colour have the capacity to trigger memory and evoke nostalgia by eliciting a sense of the familiar or a yearning for another time and place.

The Nostalgias Exhibition focused primarily upon photography but ultimately explored our desire to capture and catalogue experiences through the mediated image. Like a photograph, A Collected History of Light captures the experience of light, time and place recording subjective and atmospheric variations within specific locations. However, the artwork moves beyond the photographic form both in content and presentation, as all recognisable visual reference is extracted from the moving light samples. The viewer is invited to enter into an interactive, multimodal dialogue with the light, which elicits his or her own yearnings for place and preservation, triggering memory and generating new perceptual experiences. Ultimately the archive itself becomes an object of nostalgia as it preserves the dialogue between light, time and place.