I built the first instruments with the artistic purpose of “extending” my body. Light was the ideal medium. The body-mounted tools allowed me to “move” space around viewers so they would be “inside” the body-movement experience.

I’ve developed many Light Dance versions, tools, and techniques, but the purpose always goes back to the beginning: the articulation of light from my body to shape space and time in perception.

Body movements evoke two, three and four dimensions in the viewer’s perception. Light Dance is not about illuminating the “hard” space, but using light to elicit shared experiences of seeing.

Increasingly, I saw connections between Light Dance experiences and what we understand through science about the early stages of visual processing.

Vision science seeks to understand how the human brain constructs a consistently accurate model of the world from the scant information that lands on the retinae. As an artist, I approach the same problem experientially. I use light to “speak” to the low-level visual system and to raise conscious awareness of its functions.

I study perception firsthand as an artist, as an experience. In pursuit of knowledge of vision and light, I believe that theoretical and experiential approaches are both necessary and complement each other.