Lights, Shadows and Reflection

From the winter to the summer, January to June, in Espoo, Finland, every morning the sun softly shined in my room. The shapes of the light on the wall had never been the same. I always spend some time looking into them while being on my bed trying to wake up. In the early summer, after I read the book Shadow-Makers: A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture, chapter 1: Shadow beginnings and the chapter 2: Primordial Shadows, the lights seem brighter on the wall and the shadows behind the curtain seem darker since then. The book inspired me to greet those lights and shadows and interact with them, not just looked into them as usual.

In a morning, I used a Super 8 film to capture the lights and used some objects such as my coins, my light table, my nail clipper, and anything in my room that can give me a reflection to animate the lights. Most of the time, I shot four frames per time and moved the objects bit by bit. I did it again and again to move the lights. Sometimes, I could not think about the number of frames I took while I was shooting as the lights had changed faster than I thought. The interaction I had with the lights and the shadows ended in less than two hours as I could not control the lights when they shined everywhere in my room. The reflection did not work anymore when the shadows were hiding.