WIP:  ## Abstract **How do light-based media practices and contemporary theoretical frameworks inform new strategies and approaches to generative, immersive, and interactive media?** By tracing a genealogy of light-based media experiences, incorporating and reconsidering recursive a/historical variants of lichtspiel practices through various lenses of applicable media theory we may recover interesting formal and structural approaches to engaging audiences. Twentieth-century cinema predominately presented linear, character-driven narratives; but that narrow conception of the medium has been shaped by shifting economic, technological, and cultural structures. Adopting emergent generative, immersive, and interactive technological affordances will demand new structural and formal approaches to cinema. The German word lichtspiel—which translates to ‘Light Play’—is an archaic term for celluloid cinema but I adopt it here as a temporary designation for **any technologically mediated experience of composed and projected light**. In this context, the term serves as what Karen Barad might call an ‘agential cut’ that temporarily stabilizes an a/historical spectrum of cinematic, theatrical, and artistic practices for analysis. This cut includes the composition, production, encounter, and integration of light as a medium of connection. From this perspective, lichtspiel is not an inter-relation of discrete pre-existing individuals: an artist, an encounter, and an audience, but an intra-action within a field that contains these. This approach serves an ethical choice to deemphasize cartesian binaries of individualism and also offers a framing that accommodates the shifting agential relations and entanglements that may occur in interactive, generative, and cybernetic media, where the audience and artist may be the same individual, or may not be human at all. Lichtspiel’s intra-actions of light composition, projection, diffraction/reflection/refraction, and phenomenological experience create immersive but fleeting realities which produce affective encounters, communicate rich subjectivities, and may (or may not) transmit clear facts or detailed stories. From antiquity’s shadow puppetry, the camera obscura, and the catoptric cistula— to the kaleidoscope, magic lantern shows, and the color organ—to twentieth-century abstract film and light art—and including contemporary interactive installations and immersive AR/VR/XR environments; lichtspiel encompasses popular cinema, but importantly includes ongoing parallel traditions of improvisatory, generative, and often non-objective light ‘play’ in both the ludic and the performative sense. These variants of lichtspiel are not excluded from media studies, but they are often treated as historical precursors of proper cinema, avant garde experiments, or technological dead-ends rather than relevant modes in an expanded field of spectacle and performance. Media Archaeology offers us a model approach to consider these practices as what Errki Huhtamo refers to as ‘topos’ or recurring modes of media, where qualities may change as structural and technological affordances shift, but some essential continuity of form or content persists—even over ‘deep-time’. Many of these individual forms have already been carefully considered in media archaeology literature, but here I am hoping to build on that research in two ways, using videographic methods, and using diffractive analysis. To fully explore the transverbal, haptic, and affective dimensions of lichtspiel, engaging in lichtspiel is ideal. Videographic research offers close engagement with the historical material and the opportunity to explore each form in theory and in practice. Where archival media is available it will be incorporated, but new content may be generated to simulate, recreate, or interpret historical media, provide visual examples of principles and offer descriptive diagrams. I am also borrowing from Karen Barad a shift away from conceptualizing research as ‘reflexive’ practice, which merely incorporates the self-aware reflection of the researcher in the exploration, toward a model of ‘diffractive’ practice, where the interactions and entanglements of observation are understood to produce novel patterns of superposition which provide information about the subject of study through material-discursive interaction. For example, offering additional audio tracks with relevant but independently conceived lecture material as an option for a video moves beyond an audio commentary reflecting on the video, or a video illustrating the point made in a voiceover. Instead, audio and video are “cut together-apart” to “re-turn” a new phenomenological experience that focuses on the interference patterns created by their differences. Multiple audio tracks offer multiple ways of engaging material. Similarly, multiple caption tracks may provide additional intra-actions. In this form of analysis, each chapter will emerge from a constitutive diffraction of theory and practice, generating new knowledge through superpositions of multiple streams of text, video, and audio, not possible with written discourse.  Each chapter is built around a single a/historical topos (form or structure) of lichtspiel and will draw from relevant theories to diffractively identify how these specific ways of structuring space, light, and time serve to project creators’ subjectivities and engage audiences, in hopes of revealing relevant approaches for light-play using emergent modes of interaction. The chapters should each stand alone although richer understanding should come from the diffractive relationships of the chapters in relation to the whole. I am early in my research phase, so I do not intend to address all of the examples below in depth, but the list offers an idea of the kinds of material I am considering, and a number of examples that I can draw from for additional support for key ideas and to illustrate continuities in the topos. There are also a number of potential overlaps within the examples. As an easy example, Jordan Belson could be considered in terms of color/affect, anamorphosis, and haptic visuality. I might even include him in all three chapters, but in each chapter the analysis would be focused on the particular aspects of his work relevant to that section. ## Outline 1. **[[100 - Occult Arts of Light and Shadow]]:** Establishes Lichtspiel as a framing and media archaeology as an approach, focuses on light dark contrast, light art, and simple forms of optical technology, slow tempos, contrast but not flicker. Karen Barad (agential realism), Zielinski’s genealogy of projection and variantology, Kircher Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Shadowgraphy, Shadow puppets, Camera Obscura, Magic Lantern/phantasmagoria, Pepper’s ghost, hold-to-light postcards, Kumi Yamashita, Anthony McCall, Robert Hook, Schlieren photography (August Toepler, 1864), Shadow Girls Cult, night shade Sarah frechette, Jason thibodeaux 2. **[[110 - Visual rhythms]]:** Establishes theoretical principles of diffractive analysis and physics of diffraction of light, along with formal elements including flicker, orbits, faster tempos, repetition and difference. Barrier-grid animation, Deleuze on rhythms, Lefebvre (Arrhythmia, Polyrhythmia, Eurhythmia, Isorhythmia), Pinwheel, Dream Machine, ripple tank, splodascope, Sitney, Tony Conrad,  Paul Sharits,  Frank Malina, Larry Cuba, John Whitney/James Whitney (Cam Machine), Tundra. 3. **[[120 - Touching Light]]: Intra-active cyber(ki)netics**: Uses contemporary interface theories to consider the historical tradition of interactive light shows, biofeedback, and sensors, toys, and other devices for possible kinetic approaches to media interactions, Erkki huhtamo: Kaleidoscope, Thomas Wilfred (clavilux), Oskar Fischinger (Lumigraph), Stereoscopy, Viewmaster, Fisher Price Movie Viewer, Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Shaw, Char Davies, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Teenage Engineering, Interactive gaming floor, Rhythm games (mai-mai), max matthews, drum buddy. 4. **[[130 - Where Jewelled Feelings May Home]]**: Affective color and light performance. Affect and phenomenology of color, pneumatic epistemology. Uses contemporary theories of color and affect to consider the historical tradition of color performance, and how they might inform the affective use of colorfields in immersive media or how AI might consider color as an affective parameter.  theories on affect and sensation Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed. pneumatic epistemology from R Bruce Elder. Louis Bertrand Castel, Bainbridge Bishop, Alexander Rimington, Loie Fuller & Gab Sorère, Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt (Nourathar), Oskar Fischinger (Color Light Music), Dorothy and Mel Tanner (Lumonics), Eno - light paintings, Jordan Belson (1926 - 2011) - Vortex Concerts, James Turrell, Dan Flavin, Anne Katrin Senstad, Angela Bulloch, Yvette Mattern, Chris Levine, toshio Matsumoto 5. **[[140 - Anamorphosis]]**: (perspective, distortions, Projection onto forms) Explores euclidean and noneuclidean projections in 2d, 3d, and 4d spaces. Considers VR/AR/XR environments and fractal forms, installation art, projection mapping. media architecture/architecture as media. John Durham Peters. Phenakistascope (time projected into space), Superhot VR (time projected into space), The Ambassadors (Holbein), panoramania, Tony Oursler, Gary Hill, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Catoptric cistula, Dome projections, The Sphere, Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Felice Varini, Georges Rousse, Stan VanDerBeek. 6. **[[150 - Non-objective Haptic Gaze]]**: Explores traditions of nonobjective cinema, direct filmmaking,  and material light shows through Laura Marks Haptic Visuality and Merleau-ponty. Douglas Trumbull, Joshua Light Show and Joshua White, liquid light shows, Len Lye/Harry Smith/jack smith, Lotte Reiniger, Brothers Quay, Bertrand Mandico, Brakhage, Emmanuel Lefrant 7. **[[160 - Language of Light]]**: Light and encryption, Text, When Light is not just light, compare with James J Gibson’s “ecological perception” of affordances. Claude Chappe Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson, Martha Rosler: Semiotics of the Kitchen, John Baldessari: Teaching plant the Alphabet, Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma, Tracey Emin(neon text), Bruce Nauman (neon text), Robert Ashley Perfect lives, Steganography, practices of Title sequences and cast and crew credits 8. [[170 - Lux et Sonus]]: Synaesthetics, Control Voltage, Oscilloscopes, and Visible Electricity, Light and graphical-sound techniques, Tesla coil, Lorentz Cannon, Dan Sandin, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Mary Ellen Bute, Hy Hirsh, Variophone, ANS synthesizer, Daphne Oram’s Oramics, Norman McLaren, Optigan/Orchestron, Iannis Xenakis, Ryoji ikeda, Squarepusher ufabulum 9. **[[180 - Algorithmic Ghosts]]**: Autonomous generative and algorithmic creative systems art, hauntology, uncanny media, Happenings, Yoko ono/Fluxus, Guy Maddin’s - Seances, Gary Hustwit - Eno, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, GANs, SORA, Runway **