Shuster + Moseley
An art studio formed by the amalgamation of two minds who love light
You talk about the magic of light. What is it about light that struck you to create art?
Edward Shushter: Light is not a simple phenomenon of nature but more like an ontological intermediary that operates across different planes: informational, natural, subtle, and imaginal. This idea underpins the ancient Platonic concept of vision, which had two characteristics – ‘passive vision’ and ‘active vision’ – an idea that has been reinforced through the history of science, where empirical study has led to further entanglements between light and mind.
Today, our bodies and minds are exposed to informational light at incredible, disorienting speeds and intensities. But our ancestors already positioned their deepest philosophies in the context of the interfacing of light, considered in this ontological context, which we can think of as having to do with entanglements or correspondences between mind and environment.
So, the artworks utilise techniques to tune these correspondences, experimenting with optical interfaces that bring about effects that engage both the physical nature of our environment and our psyche or consciousness. By interfacing emanations that are at once esoteric and informational, implicating both consciousness and the technologies of material space, the goal is stimulating active vision: the eyes of fire.
Do you feel shadows play an essential part in light art installations? Shadows are usually the most overlooked aspect of nature, often going unobserved. What do you think about them?
ES: Our Light-mobiles tune the light of a space. By this, we mean using lenses like satellites to intersect light rays from natural and artificial sources. The mobiles transmit an image–like an informational transference–encoding light through bending, distortion, refraction and reflection. But unlike informational technologies, which tend towards calculable, algorithmic processes, these dimensional, subtle, shifting tonalities of light are processed by the brain more like the way patterns of light are created by sunlight filtering through leaves: a softening of focus, a play of shadow, a dance of movement. They tend towards the subtle dimensions of phenomenal consciousness. We know how the randomness and movement of dappled light can activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Still, the spectrality implicated in this process, caused by the refraction of light, not only stimulates photoreceptors, but this emergence of colouration at the edge of light and shadow also speaks to the emergence of consciousness itself, at the edge of the internal and external. The interface ‘opens’ light, so to speak, revealing a spectral language: a twilight language. This is a site between the calculable and the incalculable; it is an ambiguity that arises from the articulation towards that which cannot be looked at directly, like the sun, which illuminates everything but is blinding to look at directly. The inherent duality of light and dark is imminent to the evolutionary individuation of phenomenal consciousness, which emerges in the in-between space: in spectrality. From a neurophysical perspective, the contrast between light and dark areas requires the visual system to adjust and adapt, both in terms of ‘intermission’ (receiving of image/reality, requiring a focusing or a ‘tuning in’ to the artwork to reveal detail in spectrality or viewpoints from different positions, requiring an embodied engagement) and ‘extra mission’ (the height and position of light source stands in for the eye, and from this point of consciousness projects a cone of light that is interfaced to produce an image of reality). The resulting increase in activity in the visual cortex is an adjustment and adaptation that speaks as an active metaphor for a process that can be described phenomenologically as cosmological and evolutionary, meaning that it mirrors the processes of the emergence of consciousness in the universe. In this spirit, we mapped the CMBR with the Institute for Computational Cosmology in Durham.
What inspired you both to collaborate and establish your studio together?
Claudia Moseley: We met in 2006 when I had just finished my degree at Goldsmiths, and Ed was studying Esoteric Philosophy. Our first collaboration was through poetry – we would write a line or two and pass it back and forth to one another, and it became a way of exploring our ideas and perspectives. We honed in on light as a foundational principle. I came from a childhood raised on cinematic film sets and a family heritage in photography, which inspired my early work at Goldsmiths. The light was a limitless medium for exploring and experimenting with locating the body in time and space. For Ed, light was a recurring and fundamental symbol of consciousness.
Do you think light evokes emotion?
CM and ES: Light transcends illumination to directly affect transformations of consciousness. It operates across multiple dimensions: informational, perceptual, emotive, conceptual and so forth. We always want the artwork to first and foremost be experienced as something aesthetical, to create an emotive and perceptual response through vision, and then this evocation naturally extrapolates into deeper engagements because of the nature of light itself.
Many works mobilise the passage from daylight to night. By day, the artwork interfaces with the ambient light of the space, enhancing the complexity and dimensional depth of the experience of light to produce a luminosity that helps extend the mind into the environment. By night, the interaction inverses, as the lenses interface with bespoke LEDs to project a composition of spectrality that brings the environment to a place of interiority.
What inspired you to measure cosmological time in ‘Horizon of Day and Night’? What is the idea behind it?
ES: Exploring the daily passage of light, draws attention to auspicious moments when the sun enters the room at a particular moment, erupting in spectral interplay or transitioning to the soft light in the evening. This affects circadian rhythms, for sure, but we have been more inspired by ancient megalithic works that implicate far longer, cosmic time cycles, with their connection to seasonality and the horizonal movements of celestial bodies, orienting the viewer to the temporal shifts that govern natural light exposure over seasons.
This highlights the meditative meaning of these kinds of works. We encourage various techniques of gazing, evoking sky-gazing and after-images inspired by Tibetan yoga, for example. But more than this, these meditations on time–where sculptures link to cosmic cycles like gnomen, expressing a geometry linked to the sun’s location, with the corresponding shadow and focal point of projected light generating a unique optical fingerprint–inscribe the singularity of a particular moment, where time stands still. The singularity of the present moment is brought to bear by the intentional mapping of the light of the sun to the internal light of the imagination through a ritualised gaze.
When you collaborate, do you typically sit together to brainstorm ideas, or do you start individually and then share your concepts? Can you describe your collaborative process?
CM: It’s hard to distinguish between our contributions as we have been working together for over a decade. In the beginning, we were more delineated in our contribution to the works, but as the pieces were realised and developed into new and other pieces, we became more intertwined. Ed has a more in-depth philosophical stance, and I have more of an art-historical context, but at this stage, our work together has become an intuitive and deeply shared process.
Have you ever had to give up on an idea for an artwork that you wanted to build? How did you move forward from there?
ES: The creation process has time cycles, which are not always intuitive. Works evolve under their internal momentums, and external factors are also always at play, guiding what is possible to realise at any particular time. It’s always quite mysterious when processes line up to enable the creation of a work. There is a coming together of so many factors, and the process is mainly about riding the wave of how things happen to move according to their dynamic. Often, the idea of a work is not ready to manifest, but this does not mean “giving up”; it just means there is not an alignment between the time of the work and the external circumstances. The idea will always persist as part of an evolving conceptual language. It’s all processual, so moving forward is about addressing the overall body and attending to the way things are moving.
Do you think one needs to have the courage to create conceptual art?
CM: You need to have the time, or give yourself the time, to be disciplined yet experimental, practical and resourceful, audacious and determined. The concept shouldn’t be something you contrive but something you can’t see an end to exploring. All these aspects support the courage needed to make art.
Which is the most absurd idea that seemed too unreal, but you still created it in a tangible form?
ES: Mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation using thousands of fragments of glass suspended in a church. We worked with the Institute of Cosmology, which has the world’s largest computer simulation model of the universe. Seeing 2300 glass fragments raised into the church Nave was spectacular, and it was amazing to talk with physicists who could locate areas they were studying.
CM: Realising ‘(Plan of the Path of Light) In the House of the Hidden Places’ at the Great Pyramids was also an incredible moment. We had developed a piece called ‘Glyphs’ in our studio as a maquette some eight years before we were invited to propose a piece for the first-ever exhibition on the Giza Plateau. We worked hard to align the numerical encoding of the sculptures with the pyramids, and the visual resonance was breathtaking.
