Statement of Intent

Most of us are familiar with air, water and land pollution, but unaware that light itself can also be a pollutant. According to one article in National Geographic, light pollution is ‘One of the most chronic environmental perturbations on Earth.’ [1]

Singapore has been named the country with the worst level of light pollution in the world, the whole of the city-state registering at 9 on the Bortle scale. [2] Due to these immense levels, people in Singapore are unable to see 99.5% of all the stars present in the night sky and the possibility of seeing the Milky Way is precluded to all of Singapore.

My intent behind this project is to visually express my concern at the detrimental effect artificial light is having on our planet. In order to do this, I intend to subvert the traditional symbolic view of light being the creative, positive, illuminating force in the universe and darkness as it’s binary opposite, a force which extinguishes, eclipses and swallows.

In fact, our natural environment requires darkness just as much as light to thrive. It is interesting to note that on a much broader scale, our universe is actually about 95% dark matter and energy with the remaining 5% consisting of the light, or familiar atomic matter. [3] Darkness is celebrated by the poet Byron in his poem of the same name, which closes with the line – ‘She was the Universe.’ [4]

To express this visually I have interfered with and polluted part of the photographic process to corrupt the printed outcome. This becomes a metaphor for the chronic impact errant light pollution is having on our planet’s delicate environment and ecosystems.

Photographs are often seen through their content and less as physical objects in themselves. Through the manipulation of my physical photographs through cutting, bending, heating and exposure to a variety of solvents and solutions, an analogy is drawn between the abuse of the physical photographs and that of our planet.

Considering that photographic materials contribute the most to the carbon footprint of my practice, I have decided to create an audio visual presentation. I believe this will also help the viewer experience the serendipitous process behind the images and heighten their impact. I have scored the presentation to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, commonly known as the ‘Moonlight Sonata’. To bring further tension between the dichotomy of darkness and light, I have reversed the score so that the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ is played backwards with additional intrusive sounds of noise pollution.

Both Science and Art are fundamentally concerned with the exploration and discovery of the unknown. In Science, you’re exploring and trying to understand something out in the external world. With Art, the exploration is internal – it’s a personal journey. From my original pinhole captures of errant artificial light to my artistic intervention with the physical prints, this body of work seeks inspiration from both

––––––––––––––––––

1. DRAKE, N. 2019. Our Nights Are Getting Brighter, And Earth Is Paying The Price. Nationalgeographic.com. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/nights-are-getting-brighter-earth-paying-the-price-light-pollution-dark-skies [accessed 28 March 2022].

2. The Bortle scale is a nine-level numeric scale that measures the night sky’s brightness of a particular location. It quantifies the astronomical observability of celestial objects and the interference caused by light pollution.

3. ARCAND, Kimberely. 2020. The Dark Universe. Available at: https://chandra.harvard.edu/darkuniverse [accessed 10 August 2022].

4. BYRON. 1816. ‘Darkness’ [final line].