Medialab Prado

This activity is part of the Light, space and perception work group, led by  Daniel Canogar, Julian Oliver and Pablo Valbuena.

"Great men do not always have great words on the tips of their tongues at the time of death. Fortunately, the usual hagiographers rush to improve and aggrandize farewells of little edifying value. Kant is an example: after having a glass of water, he murmured “Es ist gut” (“It’s good”), prior to taking his last breath. In no time, such a rude goodbye to the world underwent a metamorphosis into “Es ist gut”, understood to mean “It is well”, that is, my life is over. Of course, Jesus’ farewell on the Cross was even worse. While the Synoptics claim he screamed like an animal, pious erudite John has him say “Tetelestai”, that is, Consummatum est, which means “It is finished”.

Goethe’s fate was even more mediocre.  His last words are said to be a call for more light, although his valet de chambre offers us a more scatological version, in the other sense of the word, that is: excremental...

The evolution and purification of Goethe’s farewell to the world serves as a metaphor for the relation between light and the city. The first city lights in the first third of the 19th century were gas lanterns. They ethically fulfil and even improve the great Sarastro’s statement in “The Magic Flute” -- “The sun’s rays drive away the night”-- while correcting it technically and even metaphysically. For, in fact, in less than thirty years, luminosity did not banish the night but, to the contrary, threw it into relief and harboured it. Even so, the moral and political message was the same: light signifies order, the corrosion and destruction of opacity and impenetrability; “clarity” was the parola d'ordine (never better said), guaranteed by security (the front page of a Berlin newspaper in 1889 had a policeman in the centre whose helmet was topped with something shining that was not the time-honoured plume but rather an electric light bulb), and connected by mobility (the same electrical energy that replaced gas lanterns in the late 19th century with incandescent bulbs also did away with trolleys pulled by animals).

The switch from gas to electricity marked a dramatically theatrical step in the metaphysics of cities. A city was no longer the hierarchical, aristocratic representation of a class that highlighted its palaces and businesses while it forced working areas into the darkness of poverty, thus creating a literal centre and periphery. A city with gas light became for the first time ever a true Capital, or to put it in theatrical terms: it is transformed into a gigantic, three-dimensional outdoor embodiment of the structure of a theatre, with the night as its ceiling, punctuated by the stars of the lamps hanging over the streets, its walls the lateral stage machinery, and the streets and squares a movable stage, while the actors are smug snobs of big industry, mixed with what remains of an aristocracy by then also straight out of an operetta.

This all changed with the advent of electric lighting. And not only did night become day: night became a rival of the day and defeated it, given that the great transformation was by now two-dimensional: theatre is no longer the prevailing metaphor but instead, the art form made of light and shadow: the cinematograph. The city turned into a gargantuan curtain that was ideally egalitarian, dominated by the masses (remember Metropolis and especially Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, from 1928), where the centre is comprised of big banks and business complexes, beside the department stores that "sell" egalitarian ideology in both Fascist and Socialist systems. After all, Lenin had already unarguably defined Communism as “Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”.

Finally, at the end of the 1990s, a third transformation took place in cities based on large screens, the very image of the digitalization of information. Light-art began to serve the city to project abstract chromatic plays reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, now packed with informational captions about the stock market, electronic messages, advertising of every kind, until the city is phantasmagorically wrapped in pure appearance, behind which is hidden the filth of the day, with its everyday misfortunes and frustrations. Now one would have to sing, to the contrary: “The night-city LED screens drive away the sun and the day”. And they do well to drive them away, for the sun and the daytime city are ashamed of being-- still-- natural, a set of mortal bodies and corruptible things, of animals that howl and, in sum, of cities covered in the excrement of all to which we too now-- as Goethe once did-- bid farewell. For, if one compares all that junk and riffraff with the absolute “artificialization” of cyber-logical life, represented by Vienna's Bell Tower Antica, everything else pales in comparison. "

By Félix Duque