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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
63
The students develop extra-daily orders of reflection, explore
possible design strategies through models, build prototypes,
and explore the light situations they have instantiated. In
the preparation of the prototype environments, the students
iteratively stage experiential investigations to guide the design
process, moment by moment observing and reflecting on these
processes of engagement while these unfold, and altering the
design accordingly.
Virtual as potential
Following Grosz the sense of ‘being situated’ as participant
could be said to be a staging “of a certain virtuality, a poten-
tial” (Grosz 2001:93). The potentials can be identified as those
virtual possibilities that specify the contexts for the actualisa-
tion of the experience at any moment. The actualisation of
the virtual is a way to understand the dynamics of that which
the experience potentially is to become. The awareness of
the engagement and the context of the situation are gener-
ated simultaneously as the event progresses. The suggestion
is to compose virtual potentials, which prepare for particular
experiences to emerge from the processes of engagement in
the staged event. In line with S.E. Rasmussen, the architect is
a theatrical producer, understanding theatricality as our virtual
projections upon experienced situations (Feral 2002), – that is,
how we through our activities, senses, and memories develop
imaginary potentials of the given situation and hereby shapes
futurity, shapes potential focuses on the matter investigated,
shapes visions to be practically investigated.
The participatory experience in staged situations is, according
to Dan Graham, especially evoking attention to ‘a pure pres-
ent tense’ and stages a heightened awareness towards how
experience appears. He suggests, “the perceptual process …
should […] be understood as a continuum spanning past, pres-
ent and future” (Graham in: Bishop 2005:72). The philosopher
Henri Bergson (1988) discusses this notion of the present as an
expanded durational experience and as an extended site of per-
ceptual negotiation. He argues for a ‘lived reality’ located in the
processes between appearance and memory, as a matter of
memory that operates on the relation between what exists and
what appears, that is, the relation between our activities in the
present and our perception of our presence. Elizabeth Grosz
suggests this realm of perceptual negotiation as a process of
the actual entering into negotiation with the virtual, arguing du-
ration as an actualisation “of the virtual as that element of the
past which contains the potential to generate a future different
from the present” (Grosz 2001:xx-xxi).
When rehearsing the ability to exercise experiential engage-
ments, the methods used and qualities attained becomes
a multisensory and embodied mode of thinking; an expert
practice of what Pallasmaa (2005:46) points at as embodied
thought, brought to a level of skilled capacity that enables an
experiential position in architectural design processes. What
is the qualities in wandering, hesitating, moving ‘in the flesh
of the world’? Is it also, through embodied thought and being
embedded in the world, to start imagining new possibilities; to
imagine experiences of light and pursue the virtual as poten-
tial, expanding on the experienced qualities using the trian-
gular method, and designing from the dynamic experiential
position; from within experiencing?
Experiential engagement with architecture
The prototype development has the ability to stage experiential
situations. The prototypes are designed as formal architectural
experiential machines, which by way of the build-in staging ca-
pacities situate the participant in well-defined experiential situ-
ations. The experiential staging transfers their insights body
to body, a bodily identification as Pallasmaa suggests: “We
behold, touch, listen and measure the world with our entire
bodily existence, and the experiential world becomes organised
and articulated around the centre of the body. […] We are in
constant dialogue and interaction with the environment, to the
degree that it is impossible to detach the image of the Self from
its spatial and situational existence” (Pallasmaa 2005:64).
In that way it becomes possible to articulate experiential ac-
counts from one body to another, conveying qualities that are
only accessible through direct experience. A kind of mimesis
of the body with transfer of embodied insights through staged
situations, similar to what Pallasmaa suggests is a core part of
the architectural process: “during the design process, the ar-
chitect gradually internalises the landscape, the entire context,
and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived
building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously
through the body as tensions in the muscular system and in
the positions of the skeleton and inner organs. As the work
interacts with the body of the observer, the experience mirrors
the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture
is communication from the body of the architect directly to the
body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centu-
ries later” (Pallasmaa 2005:66-67).
Staged explorative situations offer concrete methods on
psychophysical approaches for the investigation of architec-
tural light design. The psychophysical method in discussion
stages multi-sensory experience and inaugurate evidence on
the basics of experiential accounts. The methods developed
derive from performance and installation art and uses these