Abstracts

Alice Hinrichs (DE), commissaire d’exposition indépendante (Berlin, Allemagne)
Dissecting the light art ecosystem in the digital age

Artists working with light have arguably never had so many options to display their work: with the emergence of international light festivals, social media platforms and interest by commercial clients their field of work is getting a lot of visibility. The capital-intensive installations are often realized outside of the common artistic ecosystem, where the works are prone to be devoid of their conceptual meaning, not contextualised in art historian research and funded by sponsors rather than rigorous public programs. This begs the question – how is the light art industry set up in the current digital age and how can it be improved?

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Georges Roque (FR), philosophe et historien de l’art (Mexico, Mexique)
Lumière et couleur en histoire de l’art: un bref panorama

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Adrien Lucca (FR), artiste, chercheur et professeur à La Cambre (Bruxelles, Belgique)
Quelques propriétés étranges de la lumière blanche

(FR)
De la manipulation du spectre de la lumière peut émerger une étonnante expérience. Deux lumières A et B, alors qu’elles sont différentes du point de vue de la physique, peuvent provoquer une même sensation de blanc lorsqu’elles sont réfléchies par une surface blanche. Pourtant, lorsque la lumière A éclaire un objet coloré celui-ci apparaît rouge, tandis que si la lumière B éclaire ce même objet, il est jaune. Autrement dit, pour une source de lumière donnée, ce que nous percevons comme la couleur
de la lumière est, dans une certaine mesure, indépendant de l’influence que cette lumière exerce sur la couleur des objets. Quelles sont les perspectives ouvertes par une telle expérience et par d’autres expériences similaires, où la lumière et la couleur s’influencent réciproquement ? Quels outils intellectuels et technologiques permettent aujourd’hui que de telles expériences soient intégrés au cœur d’une pratique de recherche dans le champ des arts ? Dans quelle histoire ces questions s’enracinent-elles ?

(EN)
The manipulation of the spectrum of light can cause a surprising visual experience.
Two lights A and B, while they are different from the point of view of physics, can cause the same sensation of white when they are reflected by a white surface. And yet, when the light A illuminates a certain colored object it appears red, while if it is the light B that illuminates the same object, it is yellow. In other words, for a given light source, what we perceive as the color of light is, to a certain extent, independent of how this light affects the color of the objects. What are the perspectives opened by such an experience and by other similar experiences, where light and color influence one another? What intellectual and technological tools allow such experiences to be integrated within a research practice in the field of the arts? What is the relevance of these issues in contemporary art and art history nowadays?

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Thomas Pons (FR), chimiste, enseignant-chercheur à l’ESPCI (Paris, France)
Nanomatériaux fluorescents : propriétés et applications

Les récents progrès dans la synthèse de nanomatériaux offrent un éventail très varié de matériaux fluorescents aux propriétés optiques uniques. Dans cette conférence, j’introduirai le phénomène de la fluorescence ainsi que différents matériaux fluorescents. En particulier, je présenterai les nanocristaux de semiconducteurs, aussi appelés « boîtes quantiques », et leurs propriétés optiques. Je discuterai ensuite des différentes applications de ces nanomatériaux dans les affichages (LED, écrans…) et dans le domaine biomédical. Enfin, je discuterai des possibilités offertes par ces matériaux pour réaliser des sources de lumière contrôlées.

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Marcus Pericin & Florian Bachmann (CH), artistes et professeurs à la ZHDK (Zürich, Suisse)
Seeing colour and light 

LED was still a magic word 15 years ago and the light of the future. Today it is the light of the presence. In addition to cold and warm white light, LED technology has also brought coloured light into everyday life as well as new forms of interacting with lights. Already at the beginning of this light revolution the question arose how to deal with this creative potential of coloured light in connection with coloured surfaces, time, space and perception. Selected works from research and teaching projects of the Colour-Light-Center from the beginnings of LED technology to the present will be presented. www.colourlight-center.ch

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Anne Goyer, artiste, et Anne Pillonnet, physicienne (Lyon, France)
La lumière dans la matière : le bleu sans pigment

Les couleurs sont une combinaison complexe entre matière, ondes et perception. Elles tiennent de l’art et de nombreuses sciences, autrement dit elles sont un terrain idéal d’expérience de l’interdisciplinarité. La couleur dite structurale n’a pour origine aucun pigment mais une organisation de la matière. Elle est source d’inspiration et de recherche artistique et scientifique. 
Depuis 2008, par une approche intuitive, une artiste a développé un procédé de dessin sur papier qui permet, à partir de bitume noir, de craie blanche, et de liants translucides, de créer un bleu physique de même nature que le bleu de l’atmosphère. C’est grâce à une collaboration étroite avec une équipe multidisciplinaire de l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, que ce bleu a été analysé, compris, et le protocole artistique optimisé. En parcourant à l’échelle nanométrique les couches de l’infiniment petit, Anne Goyer, artiste, et Anne Pillonnet physicienne, vous entraîneront au cœur de cet « espace lumineux ». 

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Kevin Smet (BE), Appearance & Perception group, Light & Lighting laboratory, KULeuven (Gent, Belgique)
Recent developments in color rendition evaluation

For years, light source color rendition, i.e. the way the light source spectrum impacts the colors of the objects it illuminates, has been evaluated using the color rendering index Ra standardized by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in the 1970’s. The measure is based on the concept of color fidelity, which refers to the accuracy, assessed using color differences, with which a test source renders colors relative to a reference illuminant. However, CIE Ra uses outdated color science and fails to adequately express the color rendering properties of many light sources. Therefore, a new fidelity measure, CIE Rf, has recently (2017) been proposed by CIE for more accurate scientific use. Furthermore, as color fidelity is not enough by itself to assess more subjective aspects of lighting color rendition quality, the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) has proposed an additional color gamut measure, Rg. The IES color rendition framework, recently standardized by ANSI, combines the Rf and Rg indices with many other numerical and visual information to provide a more complete description of the impact of light source spectrum on color appearance.

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Chris Pype (BE), independent light designer (Gent, Belgique)
To be announced

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Stefan Michalski (CA), senior conservation scientist (Ottawa, Canada)
Light on paintings: If it’s good enough to see, it hurts less too!

Since the advent of “artificial” lighting more than a century ago, from gas lamps to fluorescent lamps to LEDs, museums have worried more than most about the quality of the light, and whether it causes more damage than other sources. The blue or violet bump in the spectra of LED lamps gave rise to the current wave of this concern. As part of the development of lighting guidelines on LED lamps for museums, to be published in 2020 by the Canadian Conservation Institute, the author compiled all the available damage spectra of colorants and materials, and combined these with the emission spectra of light sources, old and new, with or without UV filters, and calculated the relative damage of each source. The predictions were consistent with all available experimental data that compared fading of LED lamps against incandescent lamps. The author also examined patterns of CRI, R9, and Duv data within the approximately 9000 LED lamps and luminaires listed for indoor use in the Lightingfacts.com database of 2018. Practical generalizations emerged, e.g., one can look simply for high R9, since it is almost always associated with a high CRI and low Duv. For museum display, CCI proposes “excellent quality” as CRI≥90, R9≥90 and “good quality” as CRI≥90, R9≥50. LED lamps of excellent or good quality light cause no more, and usually less, damage than all the traditionally accepted museum light sources of the past. LED lamps that cause more damage than traditional sources do exist, but they have extremely poor quality light and should not be in the museum in the first place.

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Agnes Brokerhof (NL), conservation scientist, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (Pays-Bas)
Lecture/workshop

At the conference, Agnes Brokerhof will explore how participants would manage change in a print collection in their care.

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Olivier Steib (FR), restaurateur d’œuvres d’art indépendant (Bordeaux, France)
La modernisation d’une œuvre lumineuse pour sa sauvegarde, pourquoi et comment ?

(FR)
L’ère de l’électricité et du plastique a remodelé le monde, et l’art s’en est naturellement emparé à son tour, et il est désormais courant de rencontrer des productions à composantes industrielles et technologiques dans les galeries et musées. Notre présentation sera un aperçu de l’évolution du travail des Conservateurs-Restaurateurs confrontés à ces problématiques contemporaines, telles que l’obsolescence, la panne, ou la maintenance erronée. Nous aborderons ainsi les questions de méthodologie, d’éthique et de technique.

(EN)
In a new world, shaped by plastics and electricity, art has naturally changed in both form and meaning. Nowadays, it became common to encounter industrial and technological artworks in galleries and museums. Our lecture will be a brief overview of the evolution of the work of Conservator-Restorers, confronted to those contemporary problematics, such as obsolescence, breakdown, or faulty maintenance. We will thus discuss about methodology, ethics and technics.

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Mag. Wilfried Pohl, Director Research at BARTENBACH GmbH (Autriche)
Light & Material in Lighting Design

The interdependence of light and material surfaces is a decisive factor for the appearance of objects and rooms, for visual comfort, and for the energy efficiency. It is on the one hand a scientific based interdependence (laws of optics and perception), and on the other hand a perception based matter (psychology), which is elusory and part of architecture, design and arts.
The lighting design practice is moving between technical oriented procedures (main tools are computer programs, e.g. Dialux, Relux, Radiance, etc.), and artistic oriented procedures (guided rather by experience and experiments).
Bartenbach is rather a scientific based lighting designer, working with physics, techniques and perceptual psychology (meanwhile extended to medicine, due to the 3^rd receptor and Human Centric Lighting, HCL). The presentation will give some insights in scientific basics (e.g. connection between surface structures, scattering features, appearance) and will show examples of realised design projects, following these basics.