Week 3 – 9/24 Monday – 9am – Student Holiday (really?) I’m on campus even though it’s supposedly a student holiday, and I’m hit with the unique feel of campus when not as many students are on it. It’s very subtle how the inhabitants affect the physical feel of an institutional building. And, it’s interesting how more relaxed I feel and act when the throng of students is breathing through the walls or moving through the hallways. Obviously the light has more freedom too. The light not blocked by human bodies or professors putting down the shades or closing doors. I’ve worked on several campuses over breaks and summers and it’s funny how my ownership of the place feels violated when more students return. I go from feeling like the halls seems huge and empty to feeling comfortable with that space by the end of the time, so much so that students’ return feels like a personal violation of space. Perhaps the light of these time periods also plays into these feelings. Light is different is the summer and the depth of winter, than in the fall and spring.
1:30pm – I take a field trip to my old office at 1 Beacon Street. I decide to take the bus up Mass Ave to Hynes Convention Center to hop on the Green Line. At this mid-time of day, the bright sun is over-stimulating the already chaotic atmosphere of this intersection. It occurs to me that there doesn’t seem to be any planning involved with how these areas were built up, especially since they don’t seem to take advantage of the light or natural environment that once ruled there. The landscape is totally taken over by man-made construction and control, and I miss the wild but still ordered feel of a more natural environment.
2:30pm 1 Beacon Street is a horribly boring building on the outside, but the inside is amazing light-wise because of the sheer height and views it offers. Even though my old desk is a cubicle in the middle of large floor, I just needed to poke my head over the wall to see an amazing, expansive view of the downtown. I visit to drop off some papers and pick up a new camera (!) but I’m sad about my timing – it would have been much better to be there at sunset or in the evening. All the play of the light is more exaggerated off the surrounding buildings at that time.
9/25 Tuesday
4pm – I’m in the worst lighting atmosphere ever – the computer room in Building 37, where there are no windows. It takes so much twists and turns to even find this room that I don’t even remember where I saw the last window. The unforgiving bright lights make my tired eyes hurt and I long for soothing yellow tones. I feel like this is the extreme of the man’s need to control the environment, and it’s no wonder why there’s a stereotype of the pale nerd who spends so much times in rooms like these. Here’s there’s no dialogs between the dwellers and the land; it’s only man saying, “I’m going to create my own space, as a bubble of electricity and manufactured stimulation.” I think the light here could be more balance in it’s tones and I’d feel a lot more human and less like a mouse in a cage.
8pm – I’m in the Common Room preparing for a formal Gateway presentation and I’m thinking that the yellowish tones of the light in the computer room are adding to my feeling of nausea. But how is this true when I love the yellowish light of my bedroom? Maybe it is because that yellow is accented by the red tones of my bedspread and here in the computer rooms it’s more the blue tones of the computer screens.
9:30pm – We walk from 77 Mass Ave to the Center for Real Estate across the street for our presentation and I don’t remember a detail of that walk over. Stress can totally screw with your perception of anything, including light.
10pm – When we emerge, relieved that the presentation is over, I’m not only consuming the free food but also the evening light I ignored on the way in. I notice the black silhouettes of the trees against the amber light of the streetlights, the pool of crimson light on the street at the stoplight, the haze of humidity off the streetlights and neon bus signs. Even though it’s only a half hour later, I didn’t remember the richness of this landscape on my walk in. Perhaps the emotional state of the viewer should be considered more in the interpretation of landscape. How could I capture this with a camera though?
9/26 Wed
Since I didn’t have any classes, I spend most of the day at home studying, so the light looked the same there as it did last week!
4pm – During our review of our first Light assignments, I’m ruminating on why folks are more expressive in the dark than in the light. I find this true especially in close, one-on-one relationships as well. The idea that dark places are venues for deep admissions or honest thoughts, like a Catholic church confessional, is interesting in the context of using light as a metaphor for creation. These confessions are more easily given birth in the dark than the light. And does this realization match with the stereotype that things that come from the dark are evil?
6pm – During a presentation at the Media Lab, I’m struck by the feel of the room that is very white with full windows onto the night on one side. I’m focused very directly on the light, and the conversation being recorded on the white board, but the black night is looming behind me. Ideas are being born in this bright white light, in a very contrasting way then they were during the critique. The feel of this meeting is much more communal, because it’s less about evaluating one person’s work and coming to a consensus about the state of youth created media. How does the brightness of this room play into this atmosphere? If it were dark, we could be more honest but then we wouldn’t be able to see each other’s faces to help facilitate the group process of coming to common understandings.
9/28 Thursday
9am – The sun is bright on the Briggs Field this morning (no fog) and I see a flock of geese gracing the field instead of the humid fog – a sort of living blanket this time, with the geese heads bobbing up and down like waves on the sea.
[A very busy day where I don’t particularly remember much about the light!]
9/29 Friday
8am – I’m sitting in an extra Economics lecture and I changed my spot from the day before because today I’m taping it for a friend that’s absent. I realize how different the space feels in this spot up front, in comparison to the seats I usually choose on the edges. The angle of my view of the professor and the boards seems crazily different than the day before, even though the light is basically the same (same time of day, relatively same weather). It’s a good reminder that I should not only change my spot in class, but also my stance when photographing, so I can garner different meanings from each perspective.
3pm – I’m moving this weekend so my father has come up to help me paint my bedroom back to white primer from my lovely lemon-orange shade. At this time of the day, my room is not well light by the sun (it’s on the other side of the house), so the task is even more arduous and depressing in the shadows. I feel like every movement of my brush strips the warmth of the space I had created for myself. Even though the white is bright, it is without tone, and the shadows manifest as grey tones instead of the browns that emerged with the yellow paint.
6pm – I’ve spent the rest of the day packing all my belongings, so I’m sitting in the middle of a house with blank wall and surfaces, but cluttered in the center with organically brown boxes. This weird play of space and color is heightened by the fact that I’ve gathered all my plants in the center of the room in open topped boxes, so that the emerald life I had once scattered around the space is now is one nexus in front of me. I feel like I’m in an packing jungle, and the twilight light through the very bare, curtain-less windows gives a surreal feeling of unfamiliar and strange space. Maybe this is why moving causes so much stress – it’s the disturbance of a space I had constructed over time to capture the light in a comforting way. I had tried to balance the man-made space of the apartment with the light and live vegetation and now it is no longer deliberate and composed.
8pm – I visit a friend’s new place and I’m again struck by how weird it feels to be in an apartment that is not your own and doesn’t feel like people live there. The rooms are clean and the lines of the rooms are straight, but they feel like a box instead of a home. I guess I equate the light of home with warm colors and more yellow light and not harsh white walls and clean, solid colored carpets. There’s no interesting anomalies here, such as children’s toys or plants growing against the window panes to ground me in the natural environment.
9/30 Saturday = The MOVE!
7am – I wake up early on the couch, surrounded by all the boxes and clustered plants and the warm light of the dawn seems mean and not soothing as it might feel waking up in my old yellow room. The light is unfamiliar on this side of the house as well. I don’t think I’d want to capture this light because it is so surreal for me personally.
12noon – The midday light works well for me as I walk into my new house, because the red of the flowers on the front porch seem to speak to me in words of greeting and welcome. My new house seems a unique landscape within a landscape of the cluster of houses on this new unfamiliar street.
6pm – Once we’ve moved all my belongings to the new house, we return to the old empty one to clean. I take a moment in my old bedrooms to say goodbye, in this delightful twilight, to the ivy outside the window. My mind’s eye returns the room to it’s old shade of yellow, and I think I’d be at a loss to capture this moment with a camera because the image in my head is so different in it’s construction. I’m projecting my own idea of landscape here to say goodbye, and I wonder how this compares to larger landscapes and larger goodbyes, like the ones discussed in Skamlingsbanke or on the French shore for D-Day remembrances.
9pm – My visiting brother, his girlfriend and I try out a Tibetan restaurant near my new place. It’s dark at this point but the light inside seems warm like the spicy smells coming from the kitchen. But actually, after sitting down, the my perception of the light changes. It seems to be coming from the wrong angles in the ceiling and not warm enough in tone to match the décor. And the looming figure of the Dali Lama could have been better served by candle-light or small lamps.
11pm – I’m unpacking the kitchen, and the light is very contrasted against the black night outside the windows. Right now this light is only animating me, and I wish there were more streetlights to animate the new neighborhood around me.
9/31 – Sunday
10am – Again I wake up to a new room, surrounded by white walls and boxes. But the read of my duvet cover is comforting in it’s shade and presence. The plain white walls will have to stay this way for a while, but I’m hoping to break up the light by putting out my belongings soon.
I also get to look out my new window on a Zen garden, constructed by my architect next door neighbor. He has constructed not only a play of light and shape, but also of sound (running water and funky wind chimes).
11am – The morning light in the kitchen is much less contrasted and much more comforting.
2pm – I’m pausing in unpacking to eat some leftover pizza and I notice for the first time that the shade of white in the living areas is eggshell and not white. The mid-afternoon light fares well off the warm reddish tones of the woodwork.
8pm – Between loads at the Laundromat, I stare at all the flaws in the floor tiles and the cracking blue paint on the walls – all because of the harsh fluorescent light. It’s an interesting contrast to the sultry hazy tones of Powderhouse Sq. Park across the street, where the contrast is not so high and the natural progression of shades of color mask any flaws in the view.
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