Argus
Argus is a collaboration among members of the MIT Museum Studio, the MIT Glass Lab, and the MIT Media Lab. The artwork features custom-made glass optics incorporating lead crystal for its high refractive index to shape and steer light. Informed by vision neuroscience, the work’s control of light is designed to communicate with the human visual system at fundamental levels of its ongoing perceptual construction that constitute our experiences of environmental space and time.
Argus builds on the tradition of environmental light art, particularly that of the Light-Space Modulator by László Moholy-Nagy and the Light Ballet by Otto Piene. Original optics and optical techniques manipulate light to shape the viewer’s perception of space and time. Camera obscura principles are core to the work: holes in the body of the sculpture project complex optical dynamics from inside the box onto the surfaces of the outer room. This light does not illuminate the architectural surround but becomes the object of perception itself. Light forms shift in size, shape, and speed, transforming the viewer’s experience of space. Argus realizes an artistic goal stated 100 years ago by Moholy-Nagy: the artistic control of light, making perception the medium of visual art and shifting its purpose from representation to reality-making.
