Lachlan Turczan’s installation – ‘Lucida’ – transforms light into matter, crafting spaces where the intangible becomes tangible, and perception shapes reality.
MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE, Milano Design Week 2025
Making the Invisible Visible: installation by the American artist Lachlan Turczan in collaboration with the Google design team, Milano Design Week 2025, 7-13 April, Milano, IT.
What is made visible in this interesting and highly engaging installation by American artist Lachlan Turczan is not space, as we might expect from ordinary narratives and as the description of this work of art also suggests ‘… inviting viewers to step into spaces’; in reality, what becomes visible is light itself, specifically, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by laser devices at a certain wavelength; such electromagnetic radiation interacting with artificially created water mist in the air of the pavilion, creates tangible beams that give light ‘the qualities of physical matter.’ Since our bodies are concrete entities and spaces are not, we cannot physically step into spaces; we can only do so mentally. Over time, the use (and abuse) of spatial metaphors has concealed this truth: we no longer see the truth, but we’ve learned to see spaces… and step into them.
Space, before being used as a descriptive term in a physicalist sense, is a cognitive reality and a conceptual tool available in and crafted by the artist’s mind during the creative process (similarly, architects conceptually design spaces – that is, they really create them: this is the space of the project envisioned by the minds of designers – before modifying actual places when the project goes through construction phases and the building realized). In other words space is an abstract concept, a mental framework and tool—in-here—rather than a physical entity in the world—out-there—as commonly assumed. That presupposition is culturally conditioned by decades and decades of physicalist interpretations of space initially derived from classical physics and its concept of absolute space, and later absorbed by philosophical speculation, particularly existentialist and phenomenological interpretations, before influencing other disciplines, such as. e.g., psychology, architecture, art, the social sciences, economy, marketing, and politics, ultimately becoming part of common language and intuitive thinking.[1] Over time, space became so pervasive in our descriptions and accounts of the physical world that the French philosopher Michel Foucault, a few decades ago, referred to our current era as ‘the epoch of space’ (see the article Spatiophilia). However, our cognition of space is not as intuitive as it seems, considering it took nearly two millennia to formalize in the way we understand and use it in common speech today. Without considering contemporary physics, philosophical systems, or recent scientific findings in environmental psychology and neuroscience, which challenge the notion of physical space, there is a risk in physicalist descriptions of space:[2] if we separate its unamendable sense of pure extension from the places, things, and relationships that give it meaning, we may overlook crucial aspects of reality and obscure our understanding of the complex dynamics of the physical environment (Entangled in Space); therefore, in the concrete universe of events, happenings, and physical experiences, it is places and/or things that exist, rather than space or spaces. I argue that the physicalist descriptive use of space can obscure the following aspects, thereby diminishing our critical understanding of reality: [i] physical processes—e.g., in the case of the installation, the behaviour of light or electromagnetic radiation; [ii] the interaction between physical and chemical processes, such as how light behaves when it encounters a medium composed of chemical substances like acrylic lenses, water droplets, dust particles, or colloidal particles, or opaque obstacles like the concrete floor, walls and ceiling; [iii] the interaction between physicochemical and biological processes, like light being reflected and refracted by droplets, the floor, ceiling, and walls, and then reaching the human eye, as well as particles of water and air that we breathe and encounter on our skin, and mechanical soundwaves that reach our ears and are processed by the brain, and so on; [iv] the interaction between biological processes and social processes; [v] the interaction between social processes and ecological processes, and [vi] with cultural processes, or [vii] with intellectual and symbolic processes… By using the term ‘place’ instead of ‘space’, these environmental processes can be more easily identified, considered, and analyzed as reality is the place where processes become actual (i.e., place as a system of processes). Whether we consider the environmental reality as a background or a foreground of events and experiences, this is what a physical environment is: a place of processes. Only in place can the invisible be made visible and the intangible tangible.
Notes
[1] Concerning architecture, it is clear that space—I mean the integrated system of three dimensions—is a conceptual invention of our modern era, as evidenced by its absence in the descriptions of buildings in the book The International Style (1932), a pivotal moment for the discipline. As British historian of architecture Adrian Forty notes in Words and Buildings (2000), the concept of space only began to permeate general architectural debates after the 1940s, following the first English edition of Giedion’s influential book Space, Time, and Architecture. This means pre-modern architects did not have the concept of space as a disciplinary device or tool at their disposal to design buildings (see the articles Mind, Space, Architecture: On The International Style, On the Ambiguous Language of Space, Concepts of Space in Vitruvius, Anachronistic Interpretations of Space).
[2] Contemporary physics abandoned the concept of space from the beginning of the past century to embrace, at first, the concept of spacetime, and, later, the more realist field concept. Philosophical systems, e.g., idealism and nominalism, always rejected the notion of physical space viewing it as an ideal, conceptual, or mere nominalist dimension. Recent scientific discoveries, such as pioneering studies in environmental psychology (e.g., James J. Gibson’s work) and, more recently, neuroscience (e.g., the work of Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe on cognitive maps), have variably shown the fictitious or ideal/cognitive nature of space. Space is not physical or concrete: it is an ideal or abstract dimension. We do not grasp and step into spaces with our hands and bodies; rather, we grasp and step into them with our minds. Therefore, we do not step into spaces: we step into places. Despite that, the narration of many disciplines, including design disciplines, the arts, psychology, and the social sciences, is still anchored to the experience of ‘physical space’.
All images and video by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, CC BY-NC-SA.
CC, BY-NC-SA, RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place, 2025. All content including texts, images, documents, audio, video, and interactive media published on this website is for non-commercial, educational, and personal use only. For further information, please reach out to: info@rethinkingspaceandplace.com
