Posts Tagged ‘light’
“Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!… Here the figures, here the colors, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. O what a point is so marvelous!”*…
Centuries before photography froze the world into neat frames, scientists, poets, and artists streamed transient images into dark interior spaces with the help of a camera obscura. Julie Park explores the early modern fascination with this quasi-spiritual technology and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced…
The camera obscura, a device known as the photographic camera’s predecessor, was originally the size of a room. As an artist’s aid for rendering perspective, a scientific model for understanding optics, and a source of popular entertainment, it furnished observers with all kinds of information during the early modern period. In the context of pursuing knowledge about the natural world — whether in studying the sun, the light it emits, or the very organ for seeing, the eye — alchemists, astronomers, and mathematicians turned rooms in their homes into camera obscuras for revealing what was previously invisible.
In the most rudimentary terms, the camera obscura (whose Latin name means “dark chamber”) is a dark and enclosed environment with a hole on one side. This aperture allows light to stream into the interior space, casting moving images onto the opposite wall. Because its images of external reality appear reversed, both laterally and vertically — in colors deeper than their original, with movements intact but seemingly exaggerated — the camera obscura’s projections of the world re-envision it as a dream.
One of the very first mentions of the phenomenon behind the camera obscura is tied to the viewing of a solar eclipse. Aristotle, while observing a partial solar eclipse in the fourth century BCE, glimpsed its reflection in the play of light that seeped through the dense canopy of a tree. Here, the “dark chamber” is not a box or a room, but the critical space between solid things. Transposing this phenomenon onto the walls of domestic architecture, early modern natural philosophers made it possible to experience the domain of one’s personal space as a realm of marvelous reversal and illusion.
For Giambattista della Porta, polymath author of Natural Magic (1558), a book of natural philosophy and alchemy filled with magic tricks and scientific experiments, the camera obscura was a space for “see[ing] all things in the dark, that are outwardly done in the Sun, with the colours of them”. This evocative phrasing suggests the metaphysical happenings that the experience of being and peering inside a camera obscura offers. Della Porta’s instructions for engineering this “very pleasant and admirable” experience — among the “great secrets of Nature” — involve managing sources of light and creating the conditions by which it can be strategically channeled: “you must shut all the Chamber windows, and it will do well to shut up all holes besides”, except for one that is as wide and long as your hand. By covering the walls with paper or white cloth to create a viewing screen, the outside world will appear indoors, both familiar and estranged: “so shall you see all that is done without in the Sun, and those that walk in the streets, like to Antipodes, and what is right will be the left, and all things changed.”
A spiritual dimension inheres in this experience: the notion of illumination via obscuration that surrounds the early modern camera obscura carries remnants of the medieval period’s approach to darkness as the medium for perceiving the glorious light of God. Elina Gertsman explains how nowhere was this more evident than in windows through which light, both colored and clear, flooded into the darkness of cathedrals. Without the dimly lit cathedral space, this transmission of light as an expression of God’s splendor would not be so keenly felt. Both cathedrals and camera obscuras share the principle that dark places form the critical environment through which transformative light and its effects can be channeled. Yet in the case of camera obscuras, it was not just light alone, but ever more wondrous projections of the world that illuminated enclosed spaces…
[Park describes the camera obscuras of Johannes Kepler, Alexander Pope, Joshia Reynolds, and others…]
… While one might draw parallels with photographic technologies (both still and motion) — regarding how images are conjured by controlling an aperture — a key difference lies in the ephemerality of the viewing experience offered by the camera obscura. It captures life and its happenings as they take place, rather than preserving their images for the future. In other words, the moving images of the world it brings into its dark room are as transient as the dream state it appears to summon. And like dreams, the camera obscura could offer a new perspective on the world, to reveal things that might otherwise remain invisible. In 1764, the author of a dictionary entry on the camera obscura reflected on the ways in which the device underscores the motion of “the object itself”, such as a man walking, so that he appears to “have an undulating motion, or to rise up and down every step he takes”, in a way that could never be “observed in the man himself, as viewed by the naked eye”.
Despite their delight, the beguiled eighteenth-century viewers and inhabitants of the camera obscura’s worlds ineluctably expressed a sense of melancholy over the ephemerality of its projected scenes. Such sentiments are apparent in the numerous poems that appeared in the period conveying regret over the eventual disappearance of its pleasing phantoms. Yet, for a brief time, the camera obscura, especially when experienced as a room, gave individuals a sense of owning their own moving images of the world, in ways that might have felt far more vivid and evocative of one’s dream life than our own experiences with cinema are felt today. The moving images it mediates come from the viewer’s immediate environment, not from a world created by a scriptwriter and producer. This aspect of the camera obscura encouraged viewers to see reality in an unreal guise, both as an inner reality and a dream world, an elsewhere that is in fact quite nearby.
Paying attention to the historical role that the camera obscura played — allowing humans a safe and enclosed environment for accessing their imaginations, the sun, and many things in between — might transform the ways we look at our own spaces of solitude. Its visual effects can make us see that our emotional and mental landscapes are inseparable from the spaces in which we live and organize our lives. The very walls that provide us with shelter can also transform the world into scenes from a passing dream. By showing the world “with all things changed”, the camera obscura reveals just how clearly we can see in dark places…
More on– and many wonderful illustrations of– the early modern camera obscura: “Watching the World in a Dark Room,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
* Leonardo Da Vinci on the camera obscura
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As we marvel, we might send birthday greetings to a modern photgrapher who has resurrected the technique, Abelardo Morell; he was born on this date in 1948. While his work is wide-ranging, he is perhaps best known for turning rooms into camera obscuras and then capturing the marriage of interior and exterior in large format photographs, for example:
More of Morell’s camera obscura work here.
“The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to”*…
… and, as Bartosz Ciechanowski explains in a stunningly-illustrated essay, so much more. The moon affects our tides, our light, and even the Earth’s rotation– it’s no wonder that our constant companion has so haunted human culture…
… The Moon may be just an unassuming neighbor in the sky, but its presence affects our lives in many subtle ways. When it reflects sunlight off its scarred surface to guide the way in the darkness of night, or as it breathes life into oceans by rhythmically raising tides, or when it cloaks the Sun in a rare and awe-inspiring total solar eclipse, the Moon reminds us of the celestial world right outside of the safe confines of our planet.
Traveling through the cold and empty space by Earth’s side, the Moon is always just there. It may be barren and dull, but, undeterred by its own lifelessness, it never leaves us completely alone.
Perhaps the next time you catch a glimpse of the Moon’s shiny surface beaming in the night sky, you’ll see it a little differently – not as a mundane fixture of the heavens, but as a fellow companion that gently affects our own existence…
Absolutely fascinating– and beautiful: “Moon,” from @bciechanowski.bsky.social. Via @TheBrowser.
This is (R)D‘s second visit with Ciechanowski, who earlier helped us understand “Sound”; for more of his extraordinary work, visit his archive.
More on the moon and here.
* Carl Sandburg
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As we raise our eyes, we might send celestial birthday greetings to William Wilson Morgan; he was born on this date in 1906. As astronomer and astrophysicist, he was professor and astronomy director for the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and managing editor of Astrophysical Journal. He was a leader in stellar and galaxy classification and helped prove the existence of spiral arms in our galaxy.
“The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be’”*…
One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the Universe, what we know as the indivisible quanta of reality, behave as both a wave and a particle. We can do certain experiments, like firing photons at a sheet of metal, where they act like particles, interacting with the electrons and kicking them off only if they individually have enough energy. Other experiments, like firing photons at small thin objects — whether slits, hairs, holes, spheres, or even DVDs — give patterned results that show exclusively wave-like behavior. What we observe appears to depend on which observations we make, which is frustrating, to say the least. Is there some way to tell, fundamentally, what the nature of a quanta is, and whether it’s wave-like or particle-like at its core?
That’s what Sandra Marin wants to know, asking:
“I wonder if you could help me to understand John Wheeler – the delayed choice experiment and write an article about this.”
John Wheeler was one of the most brilliant minds in physics in the 20th century, responsible for enormous advances in quantum field theory, General Relativity, black holes, and even quantum computing. Yet the idea about the delayed choice experiment hearkens all the way back to perhaps our first experience with the wave-particle duality of quantum physics: the double-slit experiment…
Although Einstein definitively wanted us to have a completely comprehensible reality, where everything that occurred obeyed our notions of cause-and-effect without any retrocausality, it was his great rival Bohr who turned out to be correct on this point. In Bohr’s own words:
“…it…can make no difference, as regards observable effects obtainable by a definite experimental arrangement, whether our plans for constructing or handling the instruments are fixed beforehand or whether we prefer to postpone the completion of our planning until a later moment when the particle is already on its way from one instrument to another.”
As far as we can tell, there is no one true objective, deterministic reality that exists independently of observers or interactions. In this Universe, you really to have to observe in order to find out what you get.
The history and the results of John Wheeler‘s famous “delayed choice” experiments: “Is Light Fundamentally A Wave Or A Particle?“
* Richard Feynman
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As we reconsider categories, we might recall that it was on this date in 1404 that King Henry IV signed the “Act Against Multipliers,” stipulating that “None from hereafter shall use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication; and if any the same do, they incur the pain of felony.” Great alarm was felt at that time lest any alchemist should succeed in “transmutation” (the conversion of a base metal into gold or silver), thus undermining the sanctity of the Royal currency and/or possibly financing rebellious uprisings. Alchemy, which had flourished since the time of Bacon, effectively became illegal.
The Act was repealed in 1689, when Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, and other members of the vanguard of the scientific revolution lobbied for its repeal.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that”*…
The inventor of the light switch, John Henry Holmes, was a Quaker, member of a doctrine generally united by a fundamental belief in the ability of each person to access “the light within”. The light switch, of course, enables each person to access the light without, and has been doing so, solidly, since 1884.
At least until the emergence of the voice- or presence-activated smart home version of lights, brave solution to an unspecified problem. Unlike contemporary design patterns, Holmes’s switch is a simple design that has lasted for centuries. Still, entering an old house, we brush our fingertips over the wall in the gloom, tracing spatial memories, caressing plaster or brick or wood before your hand brushes against an early plastic, or even Bakelite. The switch itself still tends to be firm, the ever-so-slight sensation of rolling as it moves to form a circuit, one of the most pleasingly robust ‘actions’ that an industrial designer could imagine.
It means the resilient light switch, like the door handle, reveals the accumulated touch of all those gone before, a patina of presence. Juhani Pallasmaa said that the doorhandle is the handshake of the building; is the light switch the equivalent for the room? It is the most universal of everyday objects…
If we always replace touch with voice activation, or simply by our presence entering a room, we are barely thinking or understanding, placing things out of mind. While data about those interactions exist, it is elsewhere, perceptible only to the eyes of the algorithm. We lose another element of our physicality, leaving no mark, literally. No sense of patina develops, except in invisible lines of code, datapoints feeding imperceptible learning systems of unknown provenance. As is often the case with unthinking smart systems, it is a highly individualising interface, revealing no trace of others…
From dark living rooms to dark ecology– a meditation on the humble, but crucial light switch: “Let there be light switches.”
* Dr. Martin Luther King
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As we shine on, we might recall that on this date in 1824 Beethoven’s Ninth (and final) Symphony, Chorale, premiered in Vienna, with “lyrics” by Frederich Schiller (part of his “Ode to Joy”); Beethoven’s chorus concludes:
Be embraced, ye millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Be embraced,
This kiss for the whole world!
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods!
Facsimile of Beethoven’s manuscript for “The Ode to Joy”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.”*…
A New Orleans levee, lit from above [source]
400,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals discovered fire. This ignited a relationship between people and photons that changed the course of mankind—and continues to evolve to this day…
* Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we remove our sunglasses, we might spare a thought for Roger Bacon; he died on this date in 1292. A philosopher and Franciscan friar, Bacon was one of the first to propose mathematics and experimentation as appropriate methods of science. Working in mathematics, astronomy, physics, alchemy, and languages, he was particularly impactful in optics: he elucidated the principles of refraction, reflection, and spherical aberration, and described spectacles, which soon thereafter came into use. He developed many mathematical results concerning lenses, proposed mechanically propelled ships, carriages, and flying machines, and used a camera obscura to observe eclipses of the Sun. And he was the first European give a detailed description of the process of making gunpowder.
He began his career at Oxford, then lectured for a time at Paris, where his skills as a pedagogue earned him the title Doctor Mirabilis, or “wonderful teacher.” He stopped teaching when he became a Franciscan. But his scientific work continued, despite his Order’s restrictions on activity and publication, as Bacon enjoyed the protection and patronage of Pope Clement… until, on Clement’s death, he was placed under house arrest in Oxford, where he continued his studies, but was unable to publish and communicate with fellow investigators.
Statue of Roger Bacon in the Oxford University Museum
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