Projected Visions: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Light Art in the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Projected Visions” explores electric light as a medium in twentieth and twenty-first century light art. Light art is a visual art that takes as its medium dynamic and real-time light. This dissertation discusses several light art practices to identify questions related to space, time, and perception that have been significant to the development and conceptualization of light as an artistic medium. It begins with an exploration of the careers and writings of early light artists László Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Wilfred, examining their use of projected light to create reflective viewing experiences. Moholy-Nagy and Wilfred aimed to “paint with light itself” rather than to represent light through pigment. Within Moholy-Nagy’s writing, the photogram is theorized as a screen for capturing dynamic light, while the use of multiple screens is considered to enable spatial montages that activate the space of the viewer. For the theosophically inclined Thomas Wilfred, the immersive screen acted as a window into a higher realm of consciousness, and he hoped that his Lumia compositions would hold spiritual associations for viewers. These practices present early examples of the unravelling distinction between the sculptural, the architectural, and the cinematic. This comparative study of Moholy-Nagy and Wilfred moreover reveals the different emphasis that each placed on priority, originality, and medium specificity in their theorization of light art. The dissertation further explores the legacies of these earlier light artists and the experiences that contemporary light artists intend to facilitate. It considers the ways in which contemporary artists, such as Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin, continue to employ light to provoke self-reflective, critical, and participatory viewing experiences. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of contemporary artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who questions the promises of participation, interaction, and connection that are viewed as inherent to the medium of projected light. Lozano-Hemmer’s practice critiques the dualities that are still ingrained in definitions of light. His work and artistic theory engages with various strands of the history of light art and display outlined in this dissertation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".