Texture of Light

Hockney gallery, Royal College of Art, London, 2018

Texture of Light is an installation that explored space as an intra-active system through our perceptual relationship with physical and virtual interior environments. With the use of geometric repetition, light, shadows and sound, the patterned surface explored new encounters between the material surface and media by turning the wall from a background into a performative and multi-sensory device. Our interiors are defined by multiple layers of dynamic information—the wall being the one that arrests our gaze, according to Georges Perec, perceptually delimiting our interior spatialities. This installation questions the architectural surface as standardised, inert matter, to enact it instead as an active agent—constantly changing, altering and being altered by ephemeral interactions in a multidimensional feedback loop. While physically motionless, the wall creates the illusion of continuous dynamism, triggered by the relational interface of dimming light projections and a responsive soundscape. The environment sounds of the gallery were being live processed and played back into the space, guiding the lights through their different rhythms and stages to create shifting patterned shadows and atmospheric landscapes.

*intra-action is a concept proposed by Karen Barad, referring to a new ontology wherein reality is not created by pre-fixed ‘things-in-themselves’ but by ‘things-in-phenomena’. Intra-action implies an instantiation of space and time in which all human and non-human are active agencies in the creation of phenomena in an indestructible relation.