FIGURE 10.1 View across the river Elbe, Magdeburg / © 2006 Gernot Böhme.
City lights, artificial light, new media – night turns into day, the city into an ocean of light. […] In the evenings, mediated by artificial light, even an ugly metropolis like Tokyo transforms into a glittering, vibrating, fluorescent, oscillating sea of luminosity, an ecstasy of colour and movement, full of nerviness, mad haste and speed, and stimulating intensity. (Schnell, 1993: 67)
This sentence is taken from the essay ‘City Lights’, in which Ralf Schnell sets out to articulate his enthusiasm for night time Tokyo in terms of media theory. Even if one is as fascinated as Schnell – with respect to dynamism and lighting spectacles, Shibuya is likely to outperform Times Square today – one still has to wonder whether he is able to articulate his aesthetic insights appropriately. Is Tokyo ugly as such, only transforming into a princess at night? Is the nocturnal light magic no more than a dress thrown over a dreary architecture? Or would one not, rather, have to say: This night life is life in Shibuya, and those bright strings of signs, those light points and spotlights, those swaying monitors are an essential part of architecture. Spaces are created not just by walls but also by light; vanishing points and perspectives are defined not only by stone ledges and cantilevering beams but also by light; façades are not only shaped by series of windows and stucco reliefs but also by light. Architects have always known that it is possible to build with light, and they sought to work and create effects with light. The Egyptian priests oriented their temples so that the sun entered through the open doors at dawn and caught the god’s statue; the Pantheon opened upwards towards the light; and Abbot Suger wanted to celebrate the epiphany of eternity in his church Saint Denis by flooding the building with light. In contrast with this classical way of considering light, a fundamental change began to take place when light could be technically controlled around the middle of the nineteenth century. Traditionally, considering light had been part of considering a building’s integration with its environment, including its cosmic orientation and amounted to the interaction of architecture and light. With the development of lighting technology, however, light gradually became an integral means of architecture, a kind of building material or design element. Without a doubt, the development of steel and glass constructions significantly increased the integration of natural light into architecture. However, the real revolution in the relationship of light and architecture occurred with artificial light. Even though its nineteenth-century development – from the Argand lamp to gas and incandescent mantle, right through to arc and incandescent lamps – was extremely arduous and incomplete, and even though lighting design involving reflectors, glass containers and screens was only beginning to emerge, buildings like the Parisian arcades, the architecture of display windows in department stores and, finally, modern theatres would be unthinkable without artificial light (Schivelbusch, 1988).
FIGURE 10.2 Staircase Kunsthaus (Peter Zumthor), Bregenz / © 2007 Ross Jenner.
Only during the twentieth century, however, light was made truly accessible by a sheer infinite multiplication of technical light production and design: apart from burning and glowing also ionizing; apart from mirrors, prisms, lenses also polarizers, lasers, photomultipliers, optic fibres, and much more besides. Modern technologies of light production and modulation place such an abundance of light types and effects at our disposal that it seems urgently necessary to find an orientation. As long as the techniques were restricted as during the nineteenth century, people had to be content to ask what could be done with the techniques available to them. Today, we can turn the question on its head and, taking expectations in architecture, stage design or entertainment as the starting point, ask by which technologies they can be realized. This reversal, however, presupposes an ability to articulate our experiences with light and find an orientation among them. It requires, in short, a phenomenology of light. We can safely assume in the development of such a phenomenology of light that almost all experiences that it could name are ancient. Nevertheless, the differentiating engagement with light made possible by technology may well have first set such phenomenology on its path. Even Goethe’s theory of colours, however much it polemicizes against Newtonian optics, owes its origin to the prismatic, that is, technical production of the spectrum.
The phenomenology of light
But what is a phenomenology of light?1 In answering this question, I recall Goethe’s beautiful definition of colour: ‘colour is a law of nature in relation to the sense of sight’ (1840: xl). Perhaps this phenomenology is indeed precisely about studying this law of nature in relation to the sense of sight. Very quickly, though, it will become apparent that one cannot at all limit this study to colours and that all phenomena of light – luminescence, brilliance, flickering, shadow, and much else – must be included. I want to highlight the particular aspects of this study of nature in relation to the sense of sight by an example.
Arthur Zajonc’s achievement was the attempt to bring together in a book all our experiences and ideas of light, from physics to mythology. He actually starts the book, titled Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (1993), with a strange, entirely non-phenomenological claim, namely that we cannot see light. To prove this, he constructed a box into which he projected light; he enclosed this light inside the box by some contraption, such that it could not be reflected anywhere. That Zajonc does not say anything concrete about the technology of this enclosure is a little worrying, but the effect produced by this modern magician is all the more impressive: attempting to look through a hole in the side of the book, one could not see anything at all. Everything was dark. Of course, you might say, how could one see anything? If light cannot exit, nothing can be seen.
What is un-phenomenological about Zajonc’s approach is that he already knows in advance, completely independently from seeing, that light is an electromagnetic radiation within a certain frequency spectrum. Physically, there are good reasons to say that this radiation is in the box and that we cannot see it. Phenomenologically speaking, however, there is no light, at all – given that light is the law of nature in relation to the sense of sight. It would be absurd to claim that light itself cannot be seen when talking about light as a phenomenon. Clearly, Zajonc cannot deny his professional background in physics, however much he cares about phenomenology. Granted, though, the claim that light cannot be seen also has a meaning, even if weaker, that comes closer to the phenomenon. It is well known that light slanting into a dark church interior is seen as such particularly via the dust particles it hits. It is a gross abstraction to claim that there would be nothing but pure blackness between the church window and the floor hit by the light ray if the church interior were completely clear. In any case, it is wrong to deduce that light in itself cannot be seen, except when it hits bodies, because we can also see it, after all, when we look directly into a light source – without thereby seeing anything yet. Evidently, even this weaker claim about not being able to see light as such contains an assumption, or rather aprejudice, which turns it into a mere tautology. For the claim, which assumes that seeing equates to seeing something, or, more precisely, something concrete, is an empty one since light is, indeed, nothing concrete.
This brings us to a fundamental phenomenological fact regarding light: as a phenomenon, light is primarily and properly brightness.2 We shall see that there is also an abundance of other types of light phenomena, but brightness is fundamental. The first thing I notice, when I open my eyes on a day on which I slept too long, is: it is already bright daylight. This noticing of brightness is primary and fundamental. It precedes every particular perception, for example of colours, shapes or things. All of those things I do perceive, but in brightness. And this noticing of brightness is the fundamental experience of light.
Before turning to singular phenomena in the realm of light, I would like to clarify light’s basic character as brightness a little further. Philosophers tend to call this character transcendental. Transcendental in this context means as much as the condition of possibility for … When we engage in the phenomenology of visual appearances, we notice that, among those visual appearances, light as brightness plays a special role. For everything we see, we see only insofar as it is bright. Brightness is thus a condition of possibility for seeing as such. It is transcendental to seeing.
FIGURE 10.3 Kolumba Museum (Peter Zumthor), Cologne / © 2008 Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul.
This special position of brightness in the realm of the visual contains great potential that can be used artistically. For one can say that, in brightness, appearance itself appears, or, the other way round: that brightness co-appears in each visual appearance. Conversely, this means that the art of light always simultaneously makes seeing a consideration. Already Plato suggested in his famous Analogy of the Sun that light as brightness is the condition of possibility for seeing as such. He writes:
‘If there is sight in the eyes, and its possessor is trying to make use of it, you surely realise that even in the presence of colour sight will see nothing, and the colours will remain unseen, unless one further thing joins them, a third sort of thing which exists for precisely this purpose.
‘What thing do you mean?’
‘The thing you call light.’ (Plato et al., 2000: 214)
Clearly, Plato means light qua brightness here. Brightness is itself a phenomenon, but a phenomenon with transcendental significance. Strictly speaking, brightness first makes sight a real faculty, and makes it possible that visible things can indeed be seen.
In what follows, this fundamental insight will have to be delimited, yet, still be adhered to: light is not the only condition of visibility: darkness is another. There is, however, an asymmetry between light and darkness, in that light is the condition for seeing at all; darkness is, in the interaction with light, the condition for seeing something, that is, that there are conditions providing delimitation, articulation, and certainty.
Cleared space
The first effect of light as brightness is to unfurl a space. In a sense, space is even created by light. To grasp this, though, one has to be clear about which sense of space is being deployed here. It is obviously not mathematical or physical space, which could be measured in the dark if necessary. Rather, it is about experiential space – and even then only about the space of a particular experience. We know, for instance, purely acoustic spaces from the spatial experience arising from listening with earphones. Naturally, such spaces have nothing to do with light. Rather, the space created by light is a space of distances and intervals, intervals from me. This space is best described as a cleared space (gelichteter Raum), whose characteristic quality is lightening (Hellmachen). Spatial experience also takes place in the dark, but the space can then be close and pressing in, or one can conversely get lost in the indeterminate expansion of darkness. The characteristic sudden change occurring through lightening is the realization that one is placed in intervals and that, at the same time, space surrounds one as a leeway for free movement. Therefore, the term cleared space suggests itself here for this type of space, in reference to clearing (Lichtung). For a clearing, a piece of land cleared in the forest, is determined by distances, too: by limitations, on the one hand, and by the possibility of free movement, on the other. It is characteristic of space created by light that the possibility of moving within it not only includes that of de facto but also of potential movement, that is, of mere eye movement: one can let one’s eyes wander within the cleared space. This experience cannot be had in photos, which shows that it is indeed a significant spatial experience. The reason for this is that the focus in a photo is fixed at the moment of exposure. By contrast, I can wander into the depth of the cleared space in which I find myself, that is, I can not only let my eyes wander from one object to another but also fix my attention in space at varying depths. This possibility of wandering with our eyes in the depth of space may indeed be decisive for our very feeling of being in a space.
The primary emotional experience of cleared space is one of safety and freedom. Of course, one can also encounter threats in cleared space but, really, the basic experience is that everything is at a distance, and that this distance means both safety and freedom of movement for the individual. This aspect of safety in cleared space receives the character of security whenever the cleared space itself is delimited, that is, stands out against the indeterminate space of darkness. Seen from the cleared space, on the other hand, darkness becomes a realm of uncertain threats.
Day is cleared space without boundaries. We can see here that day also has a spatial character. Day, as such, is unlimited, yet initially it has to expand in the morning and later withdraw and disappear in the evening.
One could ask whether the experience of cleared space requires the simultaneous experience of a light source. Since we have connected the phenomenon of cleared space to the simple experience of brightness, and in particular the possibility of wandering through space with one’s eyes, we probably have to say that the perception of a light source is not necessary for this experience. That is a very important statement since light is all too easily confused with the emanation from a light source in a physicalistic manner. Even the Greeks (or, more specifically, Aristotle, who did not think in a physicalistic way) always thought of light with reference to a source. Aristotle defines light as parousia (παρουσία), that is, the presence of the sun or occasionally of fire. However, given our experiences with indirect light or light-like objects, we can and must make a distinction. I call things like luminous ceilings, or even the coloured glass windows of Gothic churches (which are, as stated again and again, experienced like luminous walls), light-like objects. It may be debatable here whether it also makes sense to speak of an experience of brightness without a light source. Decisive, however, is that we can perceive brightness as such, and that the experience of cleared space therefore does not depend on the perception of a light source. There is just one effect that could give us pause here, namely the quasi-shadowless illumination of a room as it is produced, for example, by computer diodes, in which the room loses depth, or is flattened out, as it were. In some circumstances, the space can acquire almost surrealist aspects, since it is difficult just by looking to assess the relative distance between things and thereby indirectly the depth of space. That would mean, however, that precisely what I have called freedom in cleared space, as the possibility of wandering with one’s eyes in the depth of space, might be related to the rendering of contours by shadows. In that case, then, a simultaneous indirect experience of the light source, namely through the shadows cast, would be important for the full experience of cleared space.
The space of light
Light creates space – that was the first statement – and I called the space unfurled by brightness the cleared space. The cleared space is a space in which I am present, and I experience my presence in space in a particular way through brightness. It is, however, also possible to see a space created by light from the outside, as it were, like an object. This phenomenon became properly evident only with new lighting technologies and has been demonstrated in often unsettling ways in light art. I am thinking here above all of James Turrell’s work, installations of various forms in which spaces of light, like cuboids or pyramids, are seen to be floating in darkness. Characteristically, these installations require a preparatory phase in which visitors pass through a light trap before they enter into a dark space. In the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst (Museum for Modern Art), one begins to perceive after a while an image floating in front of the wall, for example, or, better perhaps, a cuboid – because the shape seems to have a certain depth – made of uniformly coloured light. Getting closer, the space within the wall opens up onto an indeterminately deep, nebulously illuminated exterior. The experience of these spaces made of light has dreamlike aspects, probably precisely because they are so completely independent from the experience of objects. This is perhaps also what makes them confusing, perhaps even frightening for some. The three-dimensional impression of these shapes depends, incidentally, also on a relative closeness of the viewer. Seen from a greater distance, they would perhaps simply appear as a light source. This phenomenon, demonstrated in its pure form in art, might also play a role in other experiences of light, albeit in less pure, that is, mixed form and overlaid with other phenomena. Thus, the experience of illuminated spaces, say, on stage or in an office looked at from the dark street, oscillates between that of spaces and sources of light. The magic of this experience may be related to that of projecting oneself, as it were, into these light spaces, and perceiving them as potentially cleared spaces, thus being transposed from the exterior in which one is located into an imaginary interior. This is also what illuminated shop windows apparently rely on, at least whenever a significant differential between the light levels of display and street is preserved. Benjamin’s remark in the Arcades work, namely that commodities are presented as on a stage, may have been made with that in mind.
The genre of spaces of light also includes holographic figures produced with light, which float freely in space due to interference effects. While this effect has, strangely, so far not yet been widely used in advertising, it has been deployed in the area of entertainment. In Disney World, for example, ghosts made out of light are on display sitting around a table. These phenomena show perhaps most clearly that light is a transcendental appearance, that is, an appearance that makes something else appear but also makes an appearance itself. We can say now that this self-manifestation of light can, at the same time, also simulate a something – a cuboid or a pyramid in Turrell’s case, or the robbers in Walt Disney’s. Therefore, these phenomena are only appearances – just as one speaks of ghosts – that is, appearances without something appearing.
As a rule, mere appearances still have to manifest themselves on something real, that is, at least on a projective plane or a monitor. However, there has been no doubt that the shapes one can see in a range of situations, from the laterna magica right through to the virtual worlds on our screens, properly consist of light, indeed, that they are photo-graphs, as they have also been called: drawings with light (Lichtbilder). The easier it is to forget about the piece of reality on which they manifest themselves, the more fascinating they become.
Lights in space
The starry sky is the prototype of the phenomenon of lights in space. Here, too, one could somehow say that light unfurls space; yet, we have to think of a different light and a different space than in the case of brightness. Stars are lights precisely in dark space, but they take away the pressing aspects of dark space or the indeterminacy in which once can get lost. They do not, as brightness does, constitute space as a space of distance. Stars do not permit an assessment of distances but they do provide space with a form, because they structure it by establishing directions. This, too, makes the sense of space reliable to a certain extent, and we know, after all, that navigation is possible only with this kind of reliability. The space that is structured by stars, however, remains itself dark. This means also that lights in space are not really perceived as light sources, even though they, incidentally, provide the clearest evidence that light can be seen. In order to be perceived as light sources, they would have to shine on something. They are, of course, factually light sources, and they do lighten up the night a little on the whole. This lightening is indiscernible and not perceived as originating from the stars – this is quite different in the moon’s case. The phenomenon of lights in space should actually be defined by this characteristic: they are perceived as points of light, not as sources of light, even if that is what they factually are. Also, this type of light is not always found unadulterated in nature. Even blurry sight or mist suffice to create a halo around stars. Fireflies are another good example of lights in space – in their case, movement adds to the effect, particularly of irregularly hovering movement. This makes explicit that lights in space are experienced as something autonomous, with a life of their own; actually something that can already be sensed when looking at stars. This may well be an effect of bodily communication, or perhaps of identification – in any case of a tendency to project oneself into the locale of light in space and even, from there, look back down onto our world.
FIGURE 10.4 Windows, Institut du monde arabe (Jean Nouvel), Paris / © 2014 Gernot Böhme.
Lights in space have meanwhile been discovered for interior architecture, probably because they afford a basic illumination in a space, without distracting light sources. They are also used for decoration, illumination and advertising. In terms of atmosphere, the association with the starry sky always plays into this deployment of artificial light. There is, however, another classical phenomenon of the type lights in space that also comes into play, namely the fireworks display.
Adorno called fireworks a basic type of ephemeral art (Adorno et al., 2002: 81). It is the celebration of impermanence. By contrast with the stars and the fireflies, there are an additional flaring up and dying down, as well as the colour and splendour of the sheaves of light, of course.
Glass fibre technology has meanwhile made the phenomenon lights in space available almost without restrictions. It promises an abundance of light phenomena that are bound to expand the spectrum from starry sky to firefly to fireworks significantly. This development started with the large fairs, the breeding ground for so many aesthetic innovations.
Things appearing in light
So far, I have discussed three main phenomena of light: cleared space, the space of light, and lights in space, without yet engaging with the relationship of light with things. This approach seemed necessary in order to avoid a traditional prejudice which brings light into a most intimate relationship with the body. This prejudice is closely related to another, that light cannot be seen. That light has an intrinsic relationship with the body is another ancient and still cumbersome prejudice. The Pythagoreans, for example, defined colour as the surface of bodies,3 because they could apparently not believe in the free existence of coloured light. And even Goethe, the master of a phenomenology of colours, declares light at a certain point in his Faust to be dependent. Mephistopheles says:
… but a part am I
Of that division which, at first, was all;
A portion of that dense obscurity,
Whose womb brought forth presumptuous Light,
That claims precedence o’er his Mother, Night!
But here his struggle must prove ever vain –
Fast linked to Body he must still remain:
He streams from Body; Body he makes bright;
And Body stops him, in his rapid flight;
I hope ere long, with Body, he will sink outright! (Goethe & Talbot, 1835: 76–78)
Now, set free from such prejudices, we can give the relationship of light with things its due appreciation.
The transcendental aspect of light, namely that it is an appearance that causes something to appear, comes properly into effect with things: they appear in light. The Greeks, at the beginning of European culture, found this phenomenon so impressive that it became the paradigm of appearance as such. Things also exist without light, of course, and they can appear for example through sound or smell. Nevertheless, Plato understood the becoming of something, as such, as an appearance in light, as a coming forth out of indeterminacy, as the attainment of contour and concision. The essence of things, for Plato, is the idea they bring to expression, and 
initially means look or appearance. The being of things, therefore, is understood via the aspect of their appearance in light.
That things appear in light means, of course, that light always co-appears on things. This is, after all, what we call in common parlance to see the light. Here, as already mentioned, darkness as an additional condition for the appearance of things comes into effect. For the appearance of things in light is, properly speaking, a coming forth from darkness. It lasts, as an appearance, only as long as darkness is not completely extinguished. Only in interplay with darkness do things in light have contour, depth and concision. I have already noted that an illuminated room without shadows appears to be almost flat, and that things, too, lose their contours in it. This is important to remember if one wants to avoid battering things with light and to preserve their dignity, significance, and generally the event of their existence as such. This is likely to be of significance particularly in advertising and the presentation of commodities. It is here that the festival of things takes place, and it is not eternal values that matter in this instance but the thing as event, its appearance.
Light on things
This takes me from the appearance of things in light to the light on things. In the interaction with things, light changes and faces us, from the side of things, in a well-nigh endless multiplicity of distinct phenomena. I skip over the realm of colours here, since they have essentially been given adequate treatment in Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Besides colours, though, there are appearances like brilliance, flickering, dullness, radiance, iridescence, fluorescence and much else. It is well known that these forms of appearance of light depend on the material on which it shines and on its surface character. There is a tendency to take these origins into perspective when characterizing and somehow ordering such phenomena. Phenomenologically, though, it would be correct to determine brilliance, faint shimmer, and iridescence, by comparing them. I will try this below with the phenomena of brilliance and faint shimmer.
Characteristically, these two terms are not only applied to surfaces but also to lights themselves. Thus, one speaks of brilliant lights on a Christmas tree decoration or of the faint shimmer of stars. These applications, for instance, when one says that a surface glitters or shimmers faintly, express somehow, in the context of things, as well, that one sees light in looking at surfaces. Yet, when I said earlier that light always co-appears in some way in the appearance of things, then this remains usually implicit. We can indeed see things in the light, without actually noticing the light about them. However, in the case of brilliance or faint shimmer, light become explicit about things. That can, in the case of brilliance, go so far that the things disappear behind it again; in the case of faint shimmer, they could blur or lose contours. On the other hand, brilliance can give things stronger contours, as long as it is not too strong; the co-appearance of light then renders the emergence of things palpable. That is why splendour on things enhances them in their dignity, as it were, it makes them appear magnificent and significant. Conversely, faint shimmer effects rather an air of restraint; yet, since it marks the beginning of splendour, as it were, this is elegant restraint or understatement. While I certainly do not want to describe the qualities of light on things in an anthropological manner, those expressions nevertheless make sense, because they are able to express the qualities of impression that things obtain from the light playing on them.
With that, the decisive expression has been mentioned: the light on things is crucially responsible for the way they impress us. When things appear in light, this may initially be still very functional and characterless. It is only through the play of light on things that appearance as such acquires a character: things appear to us in a certain way. This type of light phenomenon is extraordinarily significant. One may well say that, in design, cosmetics or architecture, the deployment of materials is essentially determined by how their surfaces interact with light. The art of surface refinement has been devoted to these qualities since the days of ancient Egypt. The talk of an era of new materiality is certainly apposite: the selection of materials plays an exceedingly important role in design and architecture. Yet, one must not forget that this concerns primarily surfaces, and that their aesthetic significance is constituted properly by their relationship with light.
I have essentially divided the light phenomena discussed here into two large groups, which differ with respect to the relationships of light with space and light with things. In concluding, I want to engage in detail with a type of light phenomenon that connects these two groups, as it were, namely so-called lighting. I do not want to associate this term with a technical and practical meaning, according to which one could ask, for instance, how to best illuminate a bathroom. When I say lighting, I mean a light phenomenon in the sense, for example, in which we talk about an evening lighting, that is, something like the glow falling on a scene and, in a way, tinging it or, better put, tuning it. A classical basic type of lighting is the red sunrise or sunset, but one also speaks of a festive, dim, cheerful or oppressive lighting. Lighting describes a basic type of atmosphere constituted by light. If atmosphere is a tuned space, or an environment that appears to people in a certain way, then the lighting of a space or scene is of decisive importance. Colours, light, distribution of light, intensity, concentration or, conversely, diffusion of light are what endow a space, or a scene, with a certain atmosphere. This is best seen in the practice of stage design, where illumination crucially determines the atmosphere or climate prevalent on stage.
In a sense, as already noted, the phenomenon of illumination is an aggregation of the other two groups of phenomena discussed, namely light and space and light on things. It is the brightness that fills a space more or less completely and plays on things – it is this interplay that constitutes the phenomenon of lighting.
When ordered by their atmospheric effects, light phenomena again show a spectrum of their own: from moods in weather and seasons (e.g., autumnal lighting and dusk) to synaesthetic characters (like cold or radiant lighting) to a deliberate mise en scène (like festive illumination), which then also has a social character. The visibility of light’s mood character (or, rather, of our being affected emotionally by light) connects this whole spectrum of light phenomena. Light as atmosphere endows the things and scenes or environments that appear in a particular light with an emotive character. We feel concerned and moved, we are tuned in a particular way by a particular lighting. In brightness (Helle), we see, and thus light is for us, as sighted beings, of extraordinary, constitutive importance. However, we have to ask whether light as lighting may not be even more important, insofar as it allows us to see the world in a particular way and thereby founds our affective participation in the world.
1See also my essay ‘Seeing Light’ in Bachmann (2006: 115–135).
2See Licht als Atmosphäre (Light as Atmosphere, in Böhme, 1998a).
3As recorded by Aristotle, in De sensu et sensibilibus (1960: 439a30 ff).