Lighting on the hyperbolic plane: Towards a new approach to controlling light on the theatre stage

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

“…These have moved over the centuries from fixed, albeit ever more sophisticated sets, to ultra-sensitive on-the-fly systems whose operators are interpreters and even improvisers in live performance dynamics, ensuring key real-time changes to lighting programmes to which they were previously passively subservient. Lighting engineer, inventor and performance scholar Nick Hunt's analyses of 'state/ cue' and 'phase transition' models emphasise these microtemporalities of 'live coding' stage practices, with their computationally discretised, richly convoluted dynamics (Hunt, 2013;Hunt, 2014).…”

Exosomatic (light) organ: Creating and using an ‘expressive instrument’ for theatre lighting control

“…However, relatively little consideration has been given to the use and control of light (other than as a carrier of projected images). I have elsewhere described a conceptual basis for a reformed role of light in theatre performance that places greater emphasis on the dynamic over the static and synoptic, and begun to suggest how a revised control interface could be designed to allow a different and perhaps extended expressive potential for the lighting artistoperator -a role more akin to that of a performer, making artistic judgements in the moment of performance (Hunt 2011). My proposal is to defer certain creative decisions, which under present theatre lighting conventions are determined and fixed by the lighting designer in advance, until the moment of performance itself, where those decisions are contingent upon performance circumstances.…”

“…The lighting data structure used by Theolux is based on the 'thread/ impulse' model I have described elsewhere (Hunt 2011). In brief, prior to rehearsal or performance the lighting artist can set up a series of threads, each of which corresponds to a lighting affect.…”

“…The rippling profile of the light intensity, with detail at different scales of resolution (from coarse to fine) might remind us of Margaret Wertheim's 'curling and crenellated forms … fluted surfaces … frilled skirts … and … animal undulations' (2006: 11) I made reference to in my previous article (Hunt 2011). Figure 7 shows some further examples from other points during the performance, showing how the manual operation allows the fade profile (the 'shape' of the fade) to move away from the linear, Euclidean geometry that would pertain had the fades run as standard automated crossfades on a conventional theatre lighting control.…”