THE BEING OF LIGHT

10/14/14

For our first blog post we acknowledge Ulrich Buddemeier for the laser he created for Preen. Working with a rotating optic, Ulli combined lasers to effect the turquoise blue ever upward rising spiral of organic light pictured below. Ulli holds a Ph.D. in plasma physics from the University of Bochum in Germany. He spent a decade working in image recognition technology and developed the deep scan web app Google Goggles. A wildly more sophisticated addendum to previous barcode scanners, Goggles scans images in field and can identify objects, such as a beer label or key, and pulls referential context from the web in response.

Lasers are his passion. “Laser light is very different. It is the purest source of light known at this time. A laser beam is comprised of a light wave of a specific frequency. All parts of the wave are oscillating synchronously. This is known as coherence. When diffracted or reflected by carefully designed optical components, the wave-like nature becomes apparent through the effect of interference.” (Ulrich Buddemeir) What is unique about Ulli’s work, is that unlike many projectionists or video artists that create space defining light installations, Ulli’s work does not reconstitute imagery that was pre-fashioned. The art occurs instantaneously. It is purely the physical path of light.

I don’t know about you, but I spent some part of the nineties dancing under a green laser beam splitter. Not the most beautiful form of light channeling. I would say that this type of entertainment is in complete contrast to someone like the mighty James Turrell, who has created spaces that alter space by diffusing light sources, such that the light is perceived to bend the space. I find most light artists to be working within one or the other spectrum. Ulli’s work is interesting for it is most often in collusion with the natural environment. Smoke or dust, it's being is light, which can only ever be perceived by that which it illuminates. Is that not true for us all? http://ublightart.com/