In the afternoon Graham Festenstein, lighting consultant, kicked off a discussion about using lighting as a tool for interpretation. New technology, he said, especially LED, presents new opportunities, “new revolution” in lighting. It’s smaller, with better optics, and control. And also more affordable! He used cave paintings as an example. Lighting designers could take one of three approaches to lighting such a subject: they might try and recreate the historical lighting which, for a cave painting, would have been primitive indeed, a tallow bowl light, revealing small parts of the painting at time and with an orange light; it’s more likely, given the needs of the visitor, that they might go for more wide angle lighting, revealing the whole of the painting at once; or, they might light for close up inspection of the work, to show the mark making techniques. Traditionally, a lighting designer would have had to chose just one of these approaches. But with the flexibility and versatile control of modern lighting technology, we can do all three things – caveman lighting, wide angle panorama, and close up technical lighting.
Graham’s presentation was not the strongest. heexplained that he was sceptical about LED lights at first pilot as a sceptic. He recalls a visit to a pilot project at the National Portrait Gallery. His first impressions were disappointing, but then he realised that what heith missed about the tungsten lighting to the way it it the gilded frames, and the the LED lighting was better serving the pictures. Then he went on to talk about colour, how the warm lights of the Tower of London’s torture expedition undermined the theme, but the presentation overall was somewhat woolly.
Zerlina Hughes, of studio ZNA, came next, with a very visual presentation which I found myself watching rather than taking notes.It explained her “toolkit” of interpretive lighting techniques, but I didn’t manage to list all the tools. A copy of the presentation is coming my way though, so I might return with more detail on that toolkit in a later post. One of her most recent jobs looks great however, and I’m keen to go. Say You Want a Revolution, at the V&A follows on from the Bowie show a year or so ago, but with (she promises) less clunky audio technology. I want to go.
Jonathan Howard, of DHA design, explained that like Zerlina, “most of us started as Theatre designers.” I (foolishly, I think, in retrospect) passed up an invitation to do theatre design at Central St Martins, and I think I would have been fascinated by lighting design, if I had gone, so I might have ended up at the same event, if on the other side of the podium. Museums audiences today are expecting more drama in museums, having experienced theatrical presentations like Les Miserables, and theme parks etc. I was interested to learn that in theatre, cooler colours throw objects into the background, and warmer colours push them into the foreground. This is apparently because we find the blue end of the spectrum more difficult to to focus on. In a museum space, he says, you can light the walls blue so that the edges of the gallery fall away completely. But he did have a caveat about using new lighting technology. Before rushing in to replace your lighting with LEDs and and the modern bells and whistles, ask youself:
Why are we using new tech?
Who will benefit?
Who will maintain it?
Who will support it?
Kevan Shaw, offered the most interesting insight into the State of the Art. He pointed out that lighting on the ceiling has line of sight to most things, because light travels in straight lines (mostly), and we tend to point it at things. So, he said, your ligthting letwork could make a useful communications network too. He wasn’t the first presenter to include and image of a yellow centered squat cylinder in their slide deck. And they spoke as though we all knew what it was. I had to ask, after the presentation, and they explained that it was one of these. These LED modules slip into many exisiting lamps or lumieres. They are not just a light source, but also a platform for sensors and a communications device. Lighting, Kevan argues could be the beachhead of the Internet of Things in museums.
He briefly discussed two competing architectures for smart lighting, Bluetooth, which we all know, and Zigbee, which you may be aware of through the Philip’s Hue range (which I was considering for the the Chawton experiment). He also mentioned Casambi and eyenut, I’m not sure why he thinks these are not part of the two horse race. He argues that we need interoperability. So I guess he’s saying that eventually the competing systems will eventually see a business case in adopting either Bluetooth or Zigbee as an industry standard.
With our lightbulbs communicating with each other, we can get rid of some of our wires, he argues, but it needs to be robust, reliable. And the secret to reliability is a mesh networking, robust networks for local areas. Lighting is a great place for that network to be. That capability already exits in Zigbee (so I think zigbee is what I should be using for Chawton), but its coming soon in Bluetooth. And I think Kevan believes that when it does, Bluetooth will become the VHS of the lighting system wars, and relegate Zigbee to the role of Betamax.
But the really exciting thing is Visible Light Communication, by which the building can communicate with any user with a mobile device that has a front facing camera (and the relevant software installed. He showed us a short video of the technology in Carrefour (mmm the own-brand soft goat cheese is delicious).
The opportunities for museums are obvious but, he warns, to be effectively used, museums will need resource to manage and get insight from all the data these lighting units could produce in resource. Though he says optimisticly to his fellow lighting consultants, “that need could be an opportunity for us!”
Finally we heard from Pavlina Akritas, of Arup, who took the workshop in the direction of civil engineering. Using LA’s Broad Museum as an example, she explained how in this new build, Arup engineered clever (North facing) light-wells which illuminated the museum with daylight, while ensuring that no direct Los Angeles sun fell directly onto any surface within the galleries. The light-wells included blackout blinds to limit overall light hours and photocells to measure the amountof light coming in and if neccessary, automatically supplement the light with LEDs. She also talked briefly about a project to simulate skylight for the Gagosian gallery, Grosvenor Hill.
All in all, it was a fascinating day.
This post is one of two, the first is here.
The Interpretation Game 