Cultural Curating and the Practices of Light: Speculating Diffractively

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from New Materialist philosopher Karen Barad's challenge to read “diffractively” by experimenting with different patterns of relationality, this article sets out a course of speculative inquiry inspired by the contemporary fascination with digital light-based installations. Taking the UN's designation of 2015 as the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies” as its point of departure, a subset of mediated environments are identified that transcend the distinction between physical and digital; materiality and immateriality; invisibility and presence. Employing new technologies to create deeply sensorial and highly participatory forms of aesthetic engagement, the selected examples offer a compelling indication of the post-digital aesthetics that arise from the interrelationship of art, design and computation. Its investigation is structured as a montage of two parts: following an introduction that surveys an illustrative sub-set of contemporary digital light-based art works drawn from the 2014 INST-INT conference, the second half of this text will speculate upon the “dynamic-constructive” relationship between digital media and the form-making processes associated with “practices of light” (Cubitt 2014). The implications of “post-screen media” for curatorial practice is explored in relation to the mediating function played by modes of exhibition and other program architectures.