black and white bed linen

Transforming Heritage Settings through Light-Space Interventions

Interdisciplinary creative project

Invertlight is a multi-stage project advancing a creative strategy and multimedia content (interactive performative interventions, immersive projections and spatialising art interventions) for transforming heritage spaces, in particular sacred spaces, but not exclusively, that have undergone material and functional changes throughout time.

The project was run by Norwich University of the Arts as a collaboration between three programmes: Architecture and Interior Design, Animation and Visual Effects, and Performing Arts and Film in partnership with Hungate Medieval Art, and KBITA /The Embassy Büró (Taiwan-London) between 21 March and 24 June 2024.

Why INVERTLIGHT

The project hinges on the role light has played as a form-giver, meaning-enhancer, and numinous-revealer in medieval church architecture, but acknowledges how light becomes difficult and unforgiving in heritage conditions. While we are moved by directional lighting and the stained-glass dappled surfaces in churches, the illumination levels in churches can interfere with the minimal luminosity that multimedia contemporary art installations need. The space-light interventions invert the light constraints to dynamic disruptions. In this project, light as a primordial vehicle of the sight-scape will be entangled with other sensorial journeys.

Why Intervention

Intervention refers to an intentional involvement to change the difficult trajectory of a situation. Without relinquishing its common meaning, the project capitalises on the Latin etymology of the word (a coming in between), and the medieval understanding of an interposition, intercession and/or intercessory prayers. Medieval intercessions pivoted on an in-betweenness created to bring out protection and safety. INVERTLIGHT creates light-space interventions that fulfil the medieval role of intercessions, but interogate conditions of material use. The project took a critical distance from installations understood in their double etymological senses of emplacement/settlement and investiture to emphasise the flux and flow of matter-interruptions that INVERTLIGHT seek to reveal.

Pilot Study: Hungate, Norwich, England

Partners:
Norwich University of the Arts
Hungate Medieval Art, Norwich
KBITA / The Embassy Büró (Taiwan-London)

Live performance 21 March 2024
Space-Light interventions 18 April - 20 May 2024

Live performance 21 May 2024
Space-Light intervention 23 May-3 June 2024

Live performance 21 & 22 June 2024
Space-Light intervention 6 - 24 June 2024

Team with Us for collaborations

We seek and welcome collaborations for the second stage of Invertlight to test the creative spatial content (interactive performances and immersive projections) in other local, regional, and international locations. In doing so, we aim to extend and remodel the heritage matter-flow to what might be perceived as specific, yet common, individual, yet inclusive, communities.