Light as enchantment, light show designers as enchanters

This paper explores enchantment through the creative praxis of light show designers, revealing tensions between staging and non-mediation, presence and absence, hyperreality and pre-modernity became apparent.

Lighting designers are enchanters, who evoke enchantment with ostensibly non-mediated effects by: 1) By concealing author and equipment. 2) By disrupting the senses with unfathomable effects, only feasibly achieved through magic. 3) By offered absorbing, transporting mythic narratives, which absorbed and transfixed visitors.

Tourists visit and in addition, locals are turned into tourists because the places of their everyday lives are fleetingly transformed. For example, Hull Minster visitors increased by 1500% due to the presence of The Ship of the Gods and another installation, Museum of the Moon (Williams, 2019).

To end on a cautionary note; enchantment can also be enthralling. Some researchers argue that if visitors become dependent on the amplification of attractions, requiring constant stimulation and more fantastical effects, light installations may increasingly lead to crowd-pleasing repetition and “serial reproduction” (Giordiano and Ong, 2017). Yet we argue that the propensity of light installations to delight rather than delude with mythology places them closer to the transfixing magic of the pre-modern campfire story.