Lightspace 1957-2001 - Otto Piene

Light has gained quite considerable popularity as medium of choice for artist’s in this fast paced technological age. Consider the photons that are being transformed into visual information for the brain while you read this, and think of all the screen based Generative Art, Video Installations, VJ performances that use light as a medium.

While computer control of light provides infinite possibility for changing its properties I’m also excited by work of a less technical nature having such a rich immersive effect.

In 1959 Otto Piene created ‘archaic light ballets’ based on torches and perforated cardboard, later on, in 1960, he produced a ‘mechanical light ballet’ requiring visitors to operate cranks to set ‘light objects’ to slowly move and provide a projection montage. Even later things seem to have got more mechanical, with the use of electrically powered dynamos in his ‘Automatic light ballet’.

In 2001 the Kunstmuseum Celle Mit Sammlung Robert Simon staged an exhibition of these kinds of works called Lightspace 1957-2001

The walls appear as distorted galaxies and refracted cosmos’s where lattices of light are projected from primitive shapes.

Spotted at the intriguing and fascinating ‘Space is the place – Art in the age of Orbitization’