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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
49
ture as an orchestral unit: both receive and give to one another
reciprocally. As a consequence of this line of thought, artists in
both stage work and architecture “had to seek the basic laws
of the relationship between man and space, the essence of
objects and ‘life-processes’ organised by the design of space”
(Blume 2008:45).
Lászlo Moholy-Nagy discussed this man-space relationship
as “a systematic ‘means of training’ human perception, […] for
expanding and sensitising the senses” (Blume 2008:51). As a
consequence of the introduction of analysis through abstrac-
tion, he “was committed to an all-encompassing access to
the phenomenon of space by understanding movement as an
experience of a ‘super-spatial reality of pure energies’ […] He
defined ‘vision in motion’ […] as ‘seeing, feeling and thinking
in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena’
(Blume 2008:47). The approaches with formal abstraction and
multi-sensory integration generated a succession of method-
driven approaches, which opened for body-centred experiential
accounts as a core part of analysis, discussion and creation
across artistic disciplines.
Artforms as methods
“Architecture initiates, directs and organises behaviour and
movement. […] A building is not an end in itself; it frames,
articulates, structures [and] facilitates. Consequently, basic
architectural experiences have a verb form rather than being
nouns. Authentic architectural experiences consist then, for
instance, of approaching or confronting building, rather than
the formal apprehension of a façade; of the act of entering
and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or
out through a window, rather than the window in itself as a
material object; or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather
than the fireplace as an object of visual design. Architectural
space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space
always transcends geometry and measurability” (Pallasmaa
2005:63-64). Like Pallasmaa speaks of architectural experi-
ences as having a verb-form, back in the 1960s the artist Allan
Kaprow advocated for an artform more verb-like than noun-
like. Like Kaprow and Pallasmaa, the authors of this paper
take an interest in the evolution of the experience while it is
experienced, while all experiential components dynamically
progress over time. How can the experience while engaged in
the experience be qualified, and how is it possible to enable a
position of observation within the activity of experiencing and
its dynamic developments and complex integration of percep-
tive components?
Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, and Dan Graham were among
the many protagonists in the 1960s that made the first move
towards what we nowadays term as installation art. Installation
art is considered as a hybrid discipline, which “includes archi-
tecture and performance art in its parentage” (Oliviera 1994:7).
Through their engagement with the performing arts the artists
became involved with the experiential aspect of performing in
itself, and they began to develop strategies in order to arrange
situations by which the audience could be disposed for a simi-
lar explorative experience.
Whereas Morris’ works constitute examples of working with
sculpture or objects as architectural gestures, Kaprow ap-
proaches the participatory engagement in itself, and work
towards a calculation of organised improvisations as a step
toward participatory involvement into the structure of works.
He invented concepts such as ‘the happening’ and ‘the activ-
ity’. ‘Activities’ do not have audiences “since the performer
and experiencer is the same” (Kirby 1969:160-161). An activity
is an improvisational structure that collapses the traditional
oppositional role between audience and actor, and makes
the audience engage performatively into a kind of extra-daily
behavioural situation.
Our suggestion is to make use of artistic strategies such as
Kaprow’s ’activities’ and Morris’ ’architectural gestures’ to
develop on a systematised framework of methods to constitute
an experiential system of approaches in the work with archi-
tectural lighting.
Psychophysical engagement
Light and sensory experiences
When comprehending light as architectural material, by which
we are enabled to shape spatial conditions, we realize how
light can be considered as a primary in architectural thinking,
and how it can develop as a primary concern of experiential
thought. How the form characteristics of light actualize and
is perceived as experienced phenomena, can be analysed as
zones of light and darkness. To our eyes as a sensory experi-
ence, light becomes visible in the meeting with substance and
in this meeting it reveals its characteristics as it reveals the
matter it meets. However, as an experiential account, the light
experience becomes a complex integration of all the aspects of
psychophysical engagement that a lived experience entails.
We consider light to be perceived as vision and therefore
belonging to visual domains. However, the concrete human
experience of spatial light qualities is a multi-sensory experi-
ence and works with a “polyphony of the senses, [by which] the
eye collaborates with the body and the other senses”, as Pal-
lasmaa (2005:41) observes; a perceptive condition basic to hu-