Installation by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms
The Light Archive is a light and weather archiving project: an installation for a larger space with windows to the outside. It records and plays back the light changes in the room over a period of a week, a month or a year, following the movement of the sun around the building. The Light Archive is a site responsive project that incorporates each location as part of the work.
We have developed the base of the project in January 2017 at the Grootlab building supported by DAS Research. We worked in a large black box theatre space with one side all glass windows to the outside. We created a light design in the space during the day that continued the light situation outside, so that when one entered the room one would not notice there was artificial light. It seemed like it was just the natural light from the outside lighting the room. We made and recorded various light situations at different times of the day for seven days in the week. We recorded the morning, afternoon and evening light stands of each day. In the evenings, during the sunset, we re-played all the stands from that day. The morning or afternoon light, so unrecognisible at the time, looked very different in the sunset, as the light outside quickly faded out and transformed: the intensity, the visibility, the feeling of it.
As part of the research, Julia Willms made the film The Morning Light taking a picture of always the same light stand in the room every hour. The light inside the room always stayed the same but the light outside changed during the day. The perception of the light inside changes with it.
Concept and installation development: Andrea Božić and Julia Willms; light design in collaboration with Vinny Jones.