An Ethics of Light: The Affective Turn of Contemporary Practices

This thesis proposes an understanding of light in terms of ethics through an analysis of light-based practices. The practice of light designates a technology-based art developed in the 1990s, resulting from a debate on the dematerialization of the artistic object and post-media practices. This research proposes an understanding of practices of light and questions whether these practices reflect a new sensibility which emerges from experience as opposed to metaphysical systems of representation. An ethics of light questions the ways through which practices of light renegotiate the relation between the subject of light and light as a sensuous material that imbues one’s living experience. The work of artists Mary Kelly, Ann Veronica Janssens, and Magdalena Fernandez, among others, is emblematic of a repositioning of light at the basis of a discourse that imposes an investigation of the relation between experience and ethics. Through an analysis of these artists’ practices of light, this thesis investigates how light acts as an affect and challenges the system of artistic configuration to open up to an experiential dimension of light. In particular, this research examines an embodied experience of light, focusing on the sensorium of these practices. This study draws on affect theories and feminist ethics, specifically on the ethical thinking about light by Luce Irigaray and Karen Barad, to examine the agency of light in relation to practices and experience. In so doing, this thesis argues that an ethics of light provides a useful system of analysis to rethink light in the contemporary artistic context and contributes to a feminist critical understanding of artistic practices of light.