The brief in-class screening of Thomas Wilfred’s lumia took place two weeks ago, but these days I have found myself pondering on it from time to time. Watching the slow movement of lights composed by Wilfred was breathtaking – I had not actually seen anything like it despite the fact that Wilfred invented the novel artistic form almost a hundred year ago. Accompanied by pure silence, I find the imagery a subtle combination of nature and technology featuring an unfamiliar sense of sacredness which captures my full mental attention. As I learned more about Wilfred’s life and work through Meredith Finkelstein and Paul Vlachos’ documentary LUMIA along with Keely Orgeman’s text “A Radiant Manifestation in Space: Wilfred, Lumia and Light”, I came to understand my initial response to Wilfred’s works as natural results of his two important artistic motives in my eyes, technology and spirituality.
It was important for me to understand lumia as an independent art form with its own medium, the light. The medium of light itself is crucial in shaping the artistic and philosophical value of lumia. As Orgeman suggests throughout his thorough introduction to Wilfred, light is a truly unique element in the universe full of characteristics and even its own personalities. Light possesses weight and a kind of authority, it enables humans’ optical sensations and opens a wonderful world of colors. The sense of motion, energy, and space are inherently residing in our perception of light. The connection between light and the genesis of the universe or beings is undeniable. Therefore, Wilfred’s application of light as the ultimate medium of lumia is in fact a philosophical gesture which distinguishes the art form from any other one – it is about the endless fascination with the abstract.
At the same time, I find it interesting that lumia itself contains the absolute opposition to abstraction – the kinetic machinery. The machinery/instrument is crucial in the artist’s composition of the final outcome. It seems that the invention of lumia itself is a reflection of the industrial mentality – the desire to create, but also to control and manipulate. Wilfred didn’t generate lumia freely, instead he had a certain vision for the actual outcomes and insisted being a careful arranger. The arrangement and interaction of light bulbs and various lenses weren’t spontaneous but rather results of study and experiments. According to the description in Orgeman’s text, the instrument of lumia is quite comparable to a piano not only because of the control system but also for its potential of commodification and privatization. I wonder why despite Wilfred’s numerous efforts in familiarizing the public with lumia at his time, it didn’t earn its position parallel to any common art mediums situated in the major hierarchy of visual art or music. But I truly respect Wilfred’s decision of keeping lumia as an independent form distinguished from “color music”, which I assume to be an attempt in preserving lumia’s artistry from entertainment.