Turning shadows into light: The INTERACTIVE ART installation from the 70’s you should know

3 min readFeb 25, 2019

ArtDesign is a project dedicated to the promotion of multimedia contemporary art. Today’s offer is diverse: from Arduino based artifacts up to magnificent media servers passing through a wide scope of data generating tools. These technologies and thinking paradigms are taken for granted today, but in the late 1960’s they were still gestating in the R&D departments of cutting-edge companies.

On those days, in Paris, there was a Chilean architect captivated by the relationship between technology, science and art. His name was Juan Downey. His works are many, involving multiple channel video installations, audio-kinetic sculptures and philosophical dialogues through chat in ARPANET (a precursor of the present internet).

In 2013, Museo Tamayo (México City) hosted an exposition called “A Communications Utopia”, a curated selection of Downey’s work. There was an installation that caught my eye: Against Shadows.

Downey’s interest in data flow is evident in this electronic sculpture. Unidirectional flow is one way of perceiving data. But what if this data passes through an entity capable of reacting and introducing new data to the system? Here comes the concept of feedback. And this entity capable of giving new input is the spectator.

When placing the hands over the shadow detector, one can have this pseudo synaesthetic experience watching the light pattern in the monochromatic screen.

Downey’s statement for the electronic sculpture is the following:

“If the choice were given to me, I would pick complete inaction for my entire life. Nevertheless, I persist in the activity of building electronic sculptures because:
Their existence or destruction is irrelevant to the life of them.
They cause people to play.
They make people aware of the vast number of different kinds of energy in the universe.
They are ephemeral. This is part of a new development in the history of art: to create works that are not supposed to last for a long time.
They pose a problem for the collectors of art objects.
They create the illusion that the public can participate in the work of art. Actually we are still spectators mystified by the order that makes the world grow and move, although, we pretend we are determining what happens to us.
It is fun to talk with friends about them.
They imitate aspects of movement in life. Art is more concerned with thinking about what people experience than with producing objects.
They make people aware of lively relations between different kinds of things.
Children like them.
Sometimes they produce a reversal of natural phenomena, for example, as demonstrated by the sculpture Against Shadows.”

I believe that one’s shadow or spatial footprint will always be an interesting resource for interactive installations. The thing is, this one was made in 1970.