Art of Darkness & Dark Policy

Darkness in cities is often understood as a problem to solve, something to illuminate, reduce, or control. However, within cultural heritage sites, darkness can offer an alternative role: one that shapes atmosphere, directs attention, and contributes to the storytelling of place. The Art of Darkness project has brought renewed attention to this perspective, emphasising the value of designing with darkness rather than against it. For emerging lighting designers, this raises critical questions about how darkness can be studied, measured, evaluated, and meaningfully applied within real spatial contexts.

This paper investigates how different simulated lighting intensities applied to the same urban heritage setting shape subjective experiences and objective responses, focusing on Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen, while moving beyond the conventional understanding of darkness as the absence of light to examine how such controlled variations influence perception, atmosphere, and meaning in nighttime heritage environments. The research adopts a mixed-method approach, combining subjective and objective measures to capture perceptual and neuroaesthetic dimensions. Five simulated lighting scenarios, defined by variations in light intensity, will be developed and applied within the same cultural heritage context. These scenarios serve as stimuli to examine how differing lighting conditions influence experiential and physiological responses. Participant responses will be collected across all scenarios through an integrated methodology. Electroencephalography (EEG) will be used to record objective neurophysiological responses in real time, while post-scenario surveys will capture immediate subjective impressions. This dual-layer methodology enables the investigation of relationships between perceived experience and measurable neuroaesthetic responses.

The analysis compares EEG-derived neurophysiological patterns with participants’ reported subjective evaluations across the different lighting scenarios to identify convergences and divergences between measured response and perceived experience. The study aims to identify a range of light intensities that produce consistent alignment between participants’ subjective evaluations and their neurophysiological responses, while supporting a clear perception of the site’s narrative. Particularly, attention is given to how variations in light intensity influence attention, emotional valence, and interpretative meaning, informing how lighting can function as a communicative tool to maintain the presence and significance of cultural landmarks during nighttime conditions.

The expected outcome is a preliminary evidence-based framework for darkness-informed lighting design in cultural heritage contexts. Rather than introducing new measurement techniques, the study integrates established perceptual and physiological methods into a unified approach for evaluating darkness as a design parameter. This contributes to a more holistic understanding of nighttime environments, where sensory experience, neurophysiological response, and cultural meaning are considered together in the design process.

Introduction

Natural cycles of light & darkness form the foundation of life on planet Earth and are crucial for ecosystems and our biological clock. In our modern, illuminated society, these cycles are increasingly disrupted by artificial light, with negative consequences for people and the environment. In my role as Amsterdam’s City Light Master, I give lectures and lead light-sensitive walks. This artistic research focuses on restoring our relationship with light & darkness, from the perspective of these natural cycles, and explores how this can contribute to a regenerative light and dark policy.

Methods

The research utilises light-sensitive walks at different times of the day and night, during which participants are invited to open their senses to the subtle qualities of natural light & darkness. Reflections and visual documentation are analysed and applied. In addition, existing literature on light pollution and current lighting policy is studied. The insights from practice and theory are translated, in collaboration with the City of Amsterdam, into an integrated vision for regenerative light and darkness management.

Findings

The walks lead to a renewed experience of light & darkness, during which participants feel a deeper connection with natural rhythms and develop an awareness of the disruptive effects of artificial light. Space is created for recovery and mindfulness, both ecologically and socially. Analysis of current policy shows that safety and efficiency are often central, whilst the ecological and human need for darkness remains underexposed. The proposed regenerative policy encourages a cyclical and ecologically attuned approach to light & darkness, which promotes the wellbeing of both humans and non-humans.

Discussion

The research demonstrates that artistic and participatory approaches are powerful tools for stimulating new insights and policy innovation. Light-sensitive walks function as a sensory laboratory in which participants rediscover their relationship with natural light-dark cycles. Regenerative light & darkness policy requires a shift from a management-oriented, efficiency-focused approach to a holistic vision centred on mutual respect, attention and restoration. Applying this vision in urban environments such as Amsterdam can contribute to biodiversity restoration, the promotion of well-being and the strengthening of community bonds.

Conclusions

This artistic research demonstrates that restoring our relationship with natural cycles of light and darkness offers new perspectives for regenerative urban lighting policy. Light-sensitive walks serve as an artistic and participatory method for re-experiencing the ecological, sensory and social value of darkness. The results argue for a shift from a lighting policy primarily focused on safety and efficiency towards a cyclical and ecologically aligned approach in which both light and darkness are regarded as part of a single living system. In collaboration with the City of Amsterdam, the research is developing a practical framework for this that can contribute to biodiversity, well-being and a more reciprocal relationship between the city and its living environment.

This proposal advances darkness as a critical method and sensorial praxis for engaging ambiguity and the unknown. Contesting epistemologies of illumination that privilege control and visibility, we position darkness not as absence but as a generative medium through which alternative futures can be sensed, imagined, and collectively composed. Darkness unsettles the dualisms of light/shadow, human/nonhuman, and knowing/unknowing, inviting a relational mode of inquiry attuned to emergence rather than resolution. Within planetary crisis, ecological, social, and epistemic, darkness offers a means to inhabit uncertainty ethically and creatively.

Working within art and anthropology, our research develops experimental methodologies—Juan Fabuel’s participatory interventions with darkness to engage embodied future thinking, and Derek Pardue’s fiction writing—to explore how diminished light expands the sensorium and reveals hidden relationalities. Darkness becomes both medium and metaphor for inhabiting paradox: a condition in which uncertainty is not overcome but held as productive tension. In such spaces, anticipation transforms from prediction into care and mutual attunement, allowing hope to operate in Bloch’s sense of anticipatory existentialism: a disciplined, situated openness to what has not yet emerged and to what cannot be fully known in advance.

The proposal draws on anthropological fieldwork together with these experimental methodologies to argue that darkness is a method for exploring sensorial knowledge and the relational dynamics of nocturnal life. Through this empirical and practice-based work, we develop darkness as an existential and epistemological approach to anticipation, one that reconfigures how futures are sensed and composed rather than merely predicted. We first situate “darkness as method” in relation to existing research on darkness in sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, then elaborate our methodological and sensorial engagements with darkness in art and anthropology, and finally articulate how darkness as method contributes to anticipatory practices that dwell with, rather than resolve, uncertainty.

By foregrounding vulnerability, attentiveness, and sensory plurality, darkness as method aligns with a praxis of hope that is neither naïve nor utopian, but disciplined and project-based, and with the concerns of the Art of Darkness special session at Light Symposium 2026. It invites a reorientation toward fragile futures and relational epistemologies, futures that shimmer at the edge of perception and require us to design, not against uncertainty, but within its creative opacity. In doing so, this approach contributes to the broader discussions proposed by the special session: cultivating practices capable of staying with the unknown, holding space for ambiguity, and crafting futures through situated, collective, and multisensory forms of imagining. Darkness as method thus resonates with the special session’s invitation to explore how practices of making and imagining can engage with uncertainty, hold paradox and the unknown, and rework darkness as a relational ethics of sensing and caring for futures.

This article investigates how research design processes and mixed method approach can support the complex discipline of designing darkness-sensitive, cultural heritage lighting. To explore a transdisciplinary methodology of using mixed methods, this paper presents a methodological synthesis: It reviews and combines the methods used in three research projects within lighting design. This informs a new prospective transdisciplinary process model that positions luminance mapping as a key consideration for a lighting design approach in cultural heritage contexts. The new process model together with its suggested studies are proposed as a basis for future empirical work. The aim is that they will support the design process for lighting designers resulting in resilient, darkness‑sensitive strategies that enhance the perception of cultural heritage at night.

Architectural lighting of historic buildings is traditionally designed using physical lighting parameters such as illuminance, luminance, and correlated colour temperature (CCT). However, the relationship between objective lighting conditions and subjective visual perception remains insufficiently understood, particularly in heritage environments where aesthetic quality and atmosphere are key design objectives. This study investigates how subjective preference in heritage lighting is shaped by both physical lighting parameters and perceptual factors, including visual adaptation and lighting history.

Field experiments were conducted on illuminated historic façades and architectural elements within the Prague Castle complex using a controllable LED lighting system. 70 participants evaluated illuminated historic surfaces and architectural details under different lighting conditions. The study focused on two correlated colour temperatures (2200 K and 3000 K) and on luminance differences caused by variations in surface reflectance and lighting levels. In addition, the study examined the effect of visual adaptation and lighting history, factors that are rarely considered in architectural lighting design. Subjective assessments included overall preference, perceived brightness, and perceived colour temperature using visual analogue scales. Objective measurements were obtained through luminance mapping and spectral analysis.

Statistical evaluation was performed using paired t-tests and repeated-measures ANOVA. The results consistently indicate a preference for very warm illumination (2200 K) over 3000 K lighting. While 2200 K was consistently perceived as warm light, 3000 K was more frequently perceived as neutral white light. At the same time, scenes illuminated with 3000 K light were often evaluated as brighter. Surface reflectance significantly influenced perceived brightness but showed only limited influence on overall preference. Most notably, the results demonstrate a measurable effect of visual adaptation: identical lighting scenes were evaluated differently depending on the lighting conditions that immediately preceded them.

Contrary to common architectural lighting practice, the findings suggest that higher perceived brightness does not necessarily lead to greater visual preference in historic environments. The results further indicate that subjective evaluations are shaped not only by physical lighting parameters but also by lighting history and visual adaptation. These findings suggest that heritage lighting design should consider perceptual adaptation processes alongside conventional photometric criteria. Such an approach may support the use of very warm spectra and lower luminance levels without compromising the visual appreciation of historic architecture.