Tracing Light

TRACING LIGHT goes in search of the most fascinating and significant of all natural phenomena: light. We encounter light every day, let it warm and inspire us, use it to transport data and to understand our world.

Hardly any technical invention today can do without light and its mysterious properties. But light often eludes our understanding and our simplified view of the world. It is not like this or like that, but rather here and there at the same time.

And it somehow does not exist individually, but as interconnectedness. To shed a special light on light, TRACING LIGHT will observe how three renowned artists in collaboration with three renowned institutes develop artworks that make the fascination of the medium of light tangible to the senses. Filmmaker and cameraman Thomas Riedelsheimer will accompany these processes and, beyond that, make light in the world as we see and experience it a mysterious and fascinating protagonist in its own right. His everyday poetic view, the incredible clues from science and the imaginative transformation of this knowledge into sensual works of art are the narrative and dramaturgical levels of TRACING LIGHT.

The participating artists, Rosa Barba, Robert Henke, and Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) do not belong to the analog guard of well-known light artists. They have grown up with technology and represent a curious view of the world in which science and art complement and cross-fertilize each other. The participating scientists are also from this generation and do not correspond at all to the image of pale nerds with low energy levels and hard-to-understand output. The institutes and landscapes are as diverse and exciting as the players: The Scottish Highlands, marked by the fast-moving sunspots with the venerable University of Glasgow.

The super-modern Max Planck Institute in Erlangen, the building itself like a light sculpture in a sea of blue and white sky. The mega-institute CERN near Geneva with its glistening lake and kilometers of underground corridors. TRACING LIGHT will follow the artists. Into the institutes and into the workshops. There will also be time to chase the aurora borealis, to discover a camera obscura in a stone chamber on a lonely Scottish island or to see an installation by Anthony McCall in Hildesheim. The artists and scientists will guide me to these special places and I will try to paint very special camera images with the light I encounter on my journey.