Art meets Lighting

Tatiana.Kartashova — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 14:56:34 +0000

Museum Prinsenhof in Delft made an overview exhibition of the works of Jan Schoonhoven. Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994) is regarded as one of the most important Dutch artists of the late twentieth century. He is recognized for his extensive and systematic investigations into light, form, and volume through his sculptural wall reliefs and works on paper. The perception of the wall reliefs strongly depends on their lighting - googling a specific relief one can see that the same work at one exhibition often looked completely different at another exhibition, due to lighting variations. However, this was never demonstrated at exhibitions of his works. We were asked to collaborate in the design of the exhibition in order to show such effects and explain the scientific backgrounds. We contributed with an interactive lighting installation (graduation project of Cris van Hoogdalem, supervised by Sylvia Pont) and two chapters (authored by Sylvia Pont) in the book with the exhibition “Look, Jan Schoonhoven” (museum Prinsenhof, Delft, October 31, 2015 to February 14, 2016, see the museum agenda and the book webpage). Our lighting design was also used in the main hall of the exhibition, but in a much more subtle manner. Here our group also conducted an experiment, the results of which were presented at the VSAC 2016 symposium (The influence of illumination on perception of works by Jan Schoonhoven. Maarten W.A. Wijntjes, Susan F. te Pas, Marga P. Schoemaker, Sylvia C. Pont, F. Zhang, T. Kartashova & C. van Middelkoop). See the video about the exhibition here.

Visual perception of light qualities

Tatiana.Kartashova — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 09:59:51 +0000

It is incredible how much lighting influences our perception of shapes, materials and spaces. At the same time very few people are aware about this. I wasn't, at least before I started this project. Then I dived into the light studies from physical and, of course, perceptual perspective, and now every day I'm discovering new details about amusing abilities of our visual system to process all the information and extract necessary cues to understand what is in front of us. Here you can see a short video made for my faculty PhD day, in which I briefly introduce my project.