Introduction: Sensing and Perceiving with Light and Dark

Introduction: sensing and perceiving with light and darkThe award of the 2001 Turner Prize to Martin Creed's work, The Lights Going Off And On, attracted considerable opprobrium from within the British media.The event, they lamented, epitomised a detached, elite art establishment willing to reward work that required little thought other than a desire to outrage and shock.An alternative perspective, however, focuses on how the work, which simply features an empty white room in which a light is turned off and on every ten seconds (Martin Creed, work no 227), brings out the sheer sensory distinction between an illuminated and uniilluminated space.The transformation of such an ordinary space by artificial light, now a wholly mundane aspect of contemporary life, would have initially been enthralling during those years when first gas, and then electricity, transformed the nocturnal world from one primarily experienced as dark to one thoroughly colonised by bright illumination.We now neglect this; the everyday miracle by which electric light is deployed to utterly transform the ways in which a room is perceived and sensed.