LIGHT EDU Symposium

4 - 6 October 2018
Timisoara, Romania

ABOUT

LIGHT EDU is a comprehensive programme of educational, informational, research and cultural mediation events in the field of architectural and technical lighting in Romania. The programme was initiated out of the necessity of of long-term substantiation of the lighting design practice in Romania, where there is still a need to raise the awareness of the importance of interior and urban lighting. The symposium is organized by Romanian Order of Architects – Timiș Territorial Branch, in partnership with the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Timișoara.

LIGHT EDU Symposium's mission is to create the framework for a sustained dialogue on lighting design, stimulating the polarisation of a group of lighting design professionals and highlighting the importance of light in the perception and definition of architectural spaces. Hence, we propose the diversification and enlargement of the discussion groups in the field of lighting and lighting design in Romania.

LIGHT EDU Symposium 2018 aims to consolidate the educational platform set up at the first edition of the 2016 event, thus making it a further step towards fulfilling the vision of a context in which lighting is understood to be the most direct way of nonverbal communication through which a space can be perceived and one of the most powerful tools for night-time activation of cities.

LIGHT EDU Symposium 2018

LIGHT FOR CITIES - Using light for improving the perception of the city

"Lighting is an essential and ubiquitous part of the urban landscape. Public lighting, from iconic bridges and buildings to streets and intersections, can contribute to the socioeconomic and cultural prosperity of a region."
Susanne Seitinger

Artificial lighting evolved as a means to conquer the darkness, extending the time for using the city. Urban lighting has a major role in the activation of the public space and facilitates the apparition of civic culture. From a cultural and economical perspective, the public spaces which benefit from a good lighting project improve the quality of public life, allowing people to live, work and use the city for recreational purposes outside the daylight hours.

On the other hand, artificial lighting is used for communication, architecture becoming a broadcasting medium. The contemporary technologies used in lighting today offer new possibilities of using light as a communicator, marking the transition from functional lighting to communication.

“Successful lighting design is as much about choreographing darkness as it is about delivering light.”
Susanne Seitinger

We intend to bring up the topics of redefining the urban lighting for the ecological, recreational and economic benefits of cities.

Trying to claim lighting as a way to enhance the experience of urban space, the event is shaped as a response to the current local context, stating the pressing need for dialogue in negotiating lighting issues and drawing attention to the importance of urban lighting. Although lighting has always had symbolic associations, being a means of expressing political or economic power, it is not only a functional matter, it is, first and foremost, a matter of culture, an act with profound urban implications that affects all inhabitants of the city.

“Lighting, however much it is rooted in technology and infrastructure, is deeply social.”

The symposium is open to all who want to learn about the complexity of light.

Join the conversation! #lightedu

Speakers

Emre Gunes

Lighting Design Advocate

Chiara Carucci

Lighting Designer

Roger Narboni

Lighting designer

Lara Elbaz

Lighting designer

Marco Bevolo

Researcher and lecturer

Aura Bălănescu

Media artist

Iulian Angheluță

Social activist and activist of light

Ana Anakijev

Art historian and independent producer

Kevin Finnan

Choreographer and Artistic Director

Stefan Paskucz

Architect and lighting designer

MadebyLight

Designers’ alliance for the lighting culture

Lupercales

Collective of lighting designers and photographers

Satu Streatfield

Senior Urban Designer

Andrea Möller

Independent creative producer

Laszlo Mueller

Lighting Consultant and Regional Manager at ERCO

Paolo Stefani

Area Manager - Blaser

Bogdan Lupu

Product Marketeer Signify (Philips Lighting)

Saving the dark

directed by Sriram Murali

80% of the world’s population live under light polluted skies. What do we lose when we lose sight of the stars? Excessive and improper lighting robs us of our night skies, disrupts our sleep patterns and endangers nocturnal habitats. Saving the Dark explores the need to preserve night skies and what we can do to combat light pollution. Created in association with the International Dark-Sky Association.

Programme

19:00 Welcome reception - Ambasada
19:30 Lupercales - workshop conclusions
20:00 Participants - workshop presentation
20:30 Guided tour of the light installation at the Iron Bridge

15:30 Registration
16:00 Official opening from the organisers
Ioan Andreescu, dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Timișoara
Dragomir Dragan, president of the Romanian Order of Architects, Timiș Branch
16:30 Lara Elbaz (Madrid, ES) - How Urban light became Human light: The talk is about the evolution of urban lighting, from its purely functional origins to nowadays, where the emotional response of city users (citizens, visitors...) is a fundamental aspect of a project.
17:15 Roger Narboni [CONCEPTO] (Paris, FR) - Lighting strategies for large urban territories: The tremendous growth of cities, their mutation and their continuous development have led for many of them to the absorption or to major changes in the natural geographic site that had been the original source of their foundation. Therefore, these large urban territories cannot be seen anymore at night solely from the perspective of functional lighting. They deserve a new thinking and new lighting strategies that will naturally balance urban lighting and darkness at a very large scale in order to reconcile in the future the citizens of these new territories with their night environment.
18:00 Break
18:30 Álvaro Valdecantos [Lupercales] (Barcelona, ES) - Lighting up Urban Tactics: Actions for re-thinking the urban lighting design. Proposals, examples, questioning from an empirical method.
19:00 Iulian Angheluță [Free Miorița] (Bucharest, RO) - On people and light: The relationship between people and light has always been complicated. Pursuit, attraction, rejection. From candle to lamp, through industrialization and electrification, from light bulb to led, light has been a constant in people’s lives. Some people have too much light, in some cities there is talk about light pollution, others have pitch dark streets, and many people still long for a light bulb in their homes. Now things are more complex than ever, and, in Romania, people and light are constantly pursuing each other.
19:30 Emre Güneş [LIGMAN] (Istanbul, TR) - Searching for darkness... What is light pollution?: Can or does light pollute? How come there is a correlation between the number of stars and cows that you see in an environment? How come stars magically appears in areas far away from civilisation? Since the beginning, the earth has a 24 hours cycle divided into 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. With the invention of electrical light 120 years ago, humans changed that. We now live in a society which lives 24/7. Unfortunately, this new lifestyle comes with a payback. Our health and nature, both are in danger. Light pollution is a reality and a huge problem. Good news is that it's a problem that we can, if we want, tackle it quickly and it's only a win-win for everyone. This talk will try to give an overview of the problem and how we can help to overcome it.
20:00 Saving the Dark – documentary directed by Sriram Murali: 80% of the world’s population live under light polluted skies. What do we lose when we lose sight of the stars? Excessive and improper lighting robs us of our night skies, disrupts our sleep patterns and endangers nocturnal habitats. Saving the Dark explores the need to preserve night skies and what we can do to combat light pollution. Created in association with the International Dark-Sky Association.

15:30 Registration
16:00 Laszlo Mueller (Budapest, HU) - Light for Art
16:30 Stefan Paskucz (Baia Mare, RO) - Architecture through Nuances
17:00 Marco Bevolo (Eindhoven, NL) - What does the future hold?: At the very edge of research capabilities and well beyond the standards of natural sciences, this question remains central in the pursuit of competitive insights by political players, economic actors, and plain citizens. The future of a complex organism such as a city, with countless stakeholders involved in its continuous creation and the omnipresent possibility of "wild cards" suddenly surfacing, represents an even greater challenge. The "design platforming" is an enabler of creativity, by design. This presentation is about design-led open platforms to envision urban cities Linking practice to reflexivity, selected urban outdoors lighting manifestations in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, are retroactively mapped as future-forming moments of city identity, through a repurposed foresight matrix tool, with the intent to explore them as potential narrative triggers within given scenarios.
18:00 Break
18:30 Bogdan Lupu [Signify] (Bucharest, RO) - Light up the spirit of your city
19:00 Ferenc Haász and András Balogh [MadebyLight] (Budapest, HU) - Modeling Light in Architecture - Grappling with the Impossible: What is a lightmodel and why is it important? What can - and what cannot - a lightmodel tell us? How do lightmodels serve the planning and decision-making processes? What is unique in the VR representation of light? How is a lightmodel more than a photo? What are the features that neither of these methods has? How to build a virtual model? How to use laser scanning point cloud in modeling? How is lightmodeling more than simple visualization? How do 5000 photos of a church interior become a spatial geometry?
19:30 Emre Güneş [Ligman] (Istanbul, TR) - Human-centric lighting: A marketing concept or a reality? A summary of what is known so far.: There are a lot of hype and information going on about human-centric lighting; it's far more complicated than having a tunable white product as most of the industry tries to simplify. This talk will try to look what science has done so far about human-centric lighting and how designers can benefit from these findings for their design process.
20:00 Paolo Stefani [BLASER] (IT) - Performance in Lighting
20:30 Exhibition - VR testing

Location: Consiliul Județean Timiș, Bulevardul Revoluţiei 1989 nr. 17

14:00 Registration
14:30 Kevin Finnan [MotionHouse] (Coventry, UK) - Lumen! A show with and for Timisoara: Creating narratives with light and how light can be used to transform people's perception of familiar neglected spaces. Lumen celebrates the people of Timișoara, who shine as the constant light of the city during the considerable periods of flux in the country’s recent history, reflecting the theme of the celebrations, ‘Shine your light’. From the 5th - 7th October 2018 Kevin's latest commission, Lumen will transform a disused dock on the Bega River in Timisoara, Romania into the stage for a spectacular large-scale outdoor show, as part of the cultural programme in the lead-up to the TM2021 European Capital of Culture celebrations taking place there in 2021. Lumen celebrates the people of Timișoara, who shine as the constant light of the city during the considerable periods of flux in the country's recent history, reflecting the theme of the celebrations, 'Shine your light'.
15:00 Aura Bălănescu (Timisoara, RO) - The Immersive Light. Applications în Visual Arts: Released from the traditional status of art object through the various trans-substantiation processes mediated in the twentieth century, light becomes the prima materia with which visual artists create critically alternative realities in the context of interactive and immersive electrical environments. These complex installations not only erase the boundaries of artistic genres, painting, sculpture, architecture in favor of a total artwork, but also blur the boundaries of space-time physics, offering an unprecedented synaesthetic experience and an active consciousness.
15:30 Ana Anakijev (Belgrade, RS) - Time-Light-Motion*: The lecture investigates how the use of light blurred the lines of distinctions between the artistic disciplines. It is mainly focused on theories, meanings and the role of light in culture and society through time and how this corresponds with the development of technological experimentation in the field of art and design in past two centuries. *Referring to the same-titled text of the Yugoslav and Serbian theorist, art critic and artist Oto Bihalji Merin, written in 1972.
16:00 Break
16:30 Andrea Möller (Leeuwarden, NL) - Becoming a cultural capital, how concepts get shaped or lost along the way: Andrea was strongly involved in the application for Leeuwarden Cultural Capital of Europe in 2018. After being granted the title, she further developed various concepts for the programme, one of which is the LUNA Leeuwarden Urban Night Adventure that is now part of the closing festivities of the year. Alongside the pilot and preparations for this event, her organization entered the international network of light festivals and learned about the impact of these events on people and public space.
17:15 Satu Streatfield (London, UK) - Recasting the night, part 2: Penumbral territories: This talk explores the characters, dialogues, negotiations and conflicts that reveal themselves in the city after nightfall
18:00 Chiara Carucci (Stockholm, SE) - Sustainable Cities 24/7– It's not only dark at nighttime: "We only know the world as it is evoked by light", architect Louis Kahn once said. A seemingly obvious statement to some, perhaps. Yet lighting design is often overlooked when planning our cities. How can we co-create sustainable urban environments 24/7? The development of sustainable and safe environments is vital in most city planning projects today. Usually, the goal is to create socially coherent, accessible urban environments for inhabitants and visitors alike. But what happens to these qualities when darkness falls? In order for our urban environments to thrive we are dependent on the correlation between holistic architecture, urban planning and lighting design. In a liveable city 24/7, one simply cannot live without the other. Only through collaborative, multi-disciplinary processes can we provide the right conditions for the development of urban sustainability, equality, and economic progress around the clock. All of us, together!
18:45 Ending note
20:00 BEGA! show: BEGA! is a performative art program created by PLAI together with the creative community of Timisoara, in order to activate the banks of the Bega River and to attract the inhabitants of the city towards them by involving them in artistic activities coordinated by local organizations and partners with international expertise.

Location: Consiliul Județean Timiș, Bulevardul Revoluţiei 1989 nr. 17

WORKSHOP

Lupercales (Barcelona) 29.09-3.10.2018

The workshop is open to people who are interested in architectural lighting. Under the creative and didactic coordination of LUPERCALES, the lighting design team from Barcelona, the participants will create temporary artistic installations based on a site-specific concept which will improve the perception of space around and on the iron pedestrian bridge in Timisoara.

The workshop sessions will be held in Timisoara and will consist in planning and creating the lighting installations using professional control devices and systems. The educational component of the workshop will focus on the ergonomics and perception of a space that is accentuated by artificial light. Each participant will have the opportunity to experiment with the development, testing and implementation of the concept and design of urban lighting for a real site.

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