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TRACING LIGHT

By Thomas RIEDELSHEIMER

Documentary - Post-Production 2024

Tracing Light explores the most fascinating and significant of natural phenomena – light, with leading artists and physicists and with nature itself, as they develop artworks through which the ineffable nature of light is made tangible to our senses.

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM, GERMANY
- Director(s)
- Thomas RIEDELSHEIMER
- Producer(s)
- Sonja HENRICI (SONJA HENRICI CREATES LTD), Stefan TOLZ (Filmpunkt)
- Synopsis
- In Tracing Light, science and art interact to illuminate the birth of stars and secrets of the molecular world. Albert Einstein’s work on light and Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings changed our understanding of the world forever. These men knew the world was more complex and magical than was thought, and led their professions into abstract thinking. Now, at a radical moment in physics, we bring together leading scientists and artists who sculpt with light, across Scotland and Germany – from the western edge of the Outer Hebrides to the Max Planck Institute, Erlangen, in a quest to understand and embody the ineffable.
  
  Semiconductor artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt are working with SPAD (single-photon avalanche diode) cameras that have the ability to film how light fills a space in super slow-motion.
  
  Julie Brook, one of the few female land art practitioners, takes us on a journey of her love for light and colour with her firestack – circular rock structures in remote tidal bays on Harris, Scotland. These structures host a fire at dawn, and as the water approaches to extinguish it, the changing daylight colours create an immersive and emotional experience with ribbons of reflected light on the water, fire sparks in the dark air, rose clouds after sunset, deep blue distant mountains and the sea.
  
  Artist Duo Johannes Brunner and Raimund Ritz and Physicists at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Light engage in a playful exploration, using lasers for a unique table soccer game. The collaboration extends to the fabrication of unique glass fibres, with the artists posing illuminating questions.
  
  Talking about light sometimes seems impossible, because the quantum world does not align with our physical understanding and language. Sometimes we arrive at intellectual dead ends. This is where film takes over.