Embedded Light – Light as Texture

The way we use light is as patterns embedded into the texture of textiles, this seems to reconciliate material and immaterial elements of the design into one tangible and evolving experience. When light becomes texture in our costumes it also means that light becomes an integrated part of the artifact, used for its abilities to create surface structures and not necessarily for its affordance to produce ambient lighting effects. Textural light appeals therefore first to our tactile senses, as an analog technology before we perceive it as ambient source of immaterial self-illumination.

What interests us here is the interplay between ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ properties of a composite material resulting from combining traditional materials like textiles and immaterial substances like light patterns. For this purpose, we often ‘downgrade’ the substance of light to make it appear as tangible, textured and tactile as the analog material in which it is interweaved. We achieve that by making the light patterns visible while avoiding the EL wires and films to appear on the surfaces. Light patterns are therefore always mediated, blurred and filtered trough a semi translucent surface of ‘analog’ material. The way our senses perceive those two materials gets very similar when light patterns get integrated into material in a homogeneous manner instead of simply be superposed or juxtaposed.