Euan Williams: Turning Shadow into Transient Sight

It’s winter, it’s night, it’s cold.

A group of people are huddled outside around the bay windows of a room – trying to see what it is they are supposed to be looking at. Patience is a large part of the piece. Some give up and look away; others persist – noses pressed against the glass, hands cupped and held to their heads like brackets containing eyes.

In a 100th of a second the large strobe that is inside the room under the window flashes 1500 Joules of light into the space and against the walls – the walls then reflect the light towards the window, to the group of people, and out into the Pfefferberg yard.

In the night time the light is quite aggressive – claiming the area lit up by the flash – burning an impression of the room onto retinas. The walls within the space have been altered – each has a different shade of grey and there are thick black lines along the corners of the walls, ceiling and floor. The group walk away – taking the room with them as an afterimage – a transposed sight overlaid upon a new environment.

During the daytime the flash remains flashing but its intensity is weakened by the light of the sun. The tempo of the pauses in-between each flash varies from day to day – yet always remains slow and disparate from one another.

The flash flashed for 24 hours a day for two months and ran over the winter solstice.