Notes from a session during the luminous green workshop 31st July 2008

Raewyn Turner

My apologies for any inaccuracies, as I write this 6 months after the workshop, while at Banff ( Feb 2009), and I don't have all my notes on the participants names( will add when i return home from Banff) in the workshop.

Connection to light: Touching light began with the notion that the world is covered in a green mantle( except for the sea) and the green is touching light. I invited the participants to talk about light as a regulator in which we are bound; Our touching of light controls the energy of the body. (artist's name…..)who is documenting the calligraphy that prisoners make on the walls of the Singaporean prisons, pointed out that the prisoners aren't visible to greater society, they have no status, and must remain in the dark for the majority of their time in prison. The prisoners, who have limited access to light, bake the cakes that are sold on the streets, but if people realised that they were made by prisoners, the cakes would be regarded as impure. LIGHT ……PURITY….IMPURITY….MORBID PLACES…INSANITY….UNPREDICTABILITY……the prisoners like the sun, they don't have to be confined, they like to be out in the light, and they become very energetic and creative when they get into light. He is checking military institutions to research if there are any correlations on response to dark and light. ( artists name….) suggested that Singaporeans have less of a sense of time; living on the equator takes out the cyclic feeling of light, temperate plants don't flower as often. MEMORY and LIGHT…..in Singapore people have a different sense of memory because of all he light–its hard to structure memory because of all the light.Fibre optic-ducted sunlight is poured into buildings. Patterns of light , such as seasonality and the harvest of plants and fruit… rituals and therefore memory, as rituals are used to make the passage of time.; patterns of light are interchangeable with the rituals of life. As Virilio points out artificial light extended our wakefulness into the night.

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