Artificial illumination

Light Scapes

eople have always had an intimate relationship with light, particularly at night. At various times throughout history, the glow from a hearth, a candle, an oil lamp, or gaslight illuminated a small space around us, casting all else in darkness. That didn’t change so much with the advent of electric light, in which a single spare bulb or other source of electric illumination similarly reveals only familiar space.

Shir David, a graphic and motion designer and photographer based in Brooklyn, sought to capture the allure of the commonplace in a series of 3D-printed sculptures based on experiences with light to which most of us can relate, whether we’re up late in bed awash in the gleam of a laptop screen, entering a subterranean tavern lit by a ghostly glow of neon, or opening the fridge for a late-night snack. “The first sculpture that I did was called Nightlight,” said David, a recent graduate of New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “It was actually something that I did in this one class where we learned about 3D scanning and 3D printing. I made this sculpture of a girl sitting on her bed with her computer in the few moments before she goes to sleep. The computer is actually a light and it sort of functions as a nightlight, this whole sculpture.”

David, who was awarded a Magic Grant from Columbia Journalism School and Stanford University’s school of engineering in 2017, is bringing her series Light Scapes, comprising several small-scale sculptures, to Currents. Each one is only a few inches high by a few inches wide, but because of the precision that 3D printing allows for, they are rendered in photo-realistic detail. In fact, the sculptures — one depicting her roommate opening the door of an old-fashioned refrigerator, one showing four boys on a bench before a television screen, and one of a young woman outside the stairwell entrance to a bar — are based on photographs.

Nightlight, the first such sculpture she made, came about as an effort to document a domestic scene using the technology she had available to her. “I thought about scenes that are really mundane, but we all experience them, like opening the fridge in the middle of the night.”

In order to create the sculpture for each scene, David first took multiple shots of her subjects from several angles. “The way 3D scanning works is you need some sort of array of photos that will overlap with each other,” she said. “Then you process it, creating a 3D model out of the images.” She printed the sculptures in color, although that’s an aspect she can manipulate in the design stage. “I can also change the model, but that’s not usually something that I’m doing,” she said.

But the appeal of the sculptures is, ultimately, the light they emit, the reduction of full-scale everyday scenes into miniature, and the magic of their realism. Each one is mounted on a pedestal, inside of which the wires and electronic components are carefully hidden. David sought to capture the light itself as closely as possible, copying the original source. “The fridge has three LED lights in it,” she said. “It’s basically mimicking the blue light you have inside a fridge. The kids with the TV — I actually have a screen inside this tiny TV. It’s like a one-anda-half-inch screen. The one of girl in front of the bar has this EL wire, which is mimicking a neon sign. The stairs are hidden inside the pedestal. If your head is near to the sculpture, you see that. It’s inviting you to get even closer.” — Michael Abatemarco

The appeal of the sculptures is the light they emit, the reduction of full-scale everyday scenes into miniature, and the magic of their realism.