Visitors to the PSU campus during this year’s Portland Winter Light Festival, starting Feb. 4, will be treated to a range of light-based displays. But what they might not know is that the festival itself had its origins right within the PSU College of the Arts community.
In 2011, School of Architecture faculty member Jeff Schnabel happened upon three large projectors in PSU’s surplus storage area. Thinking it would be fun to use them to experiment with projected light on architectural objects, Schnabel decided to put them to use. He tapped some architecture students and a faculty member in the School of Film, and together, they hatched a plan to try projecting moving light on something other than a neutral, flat screen.
Film students created visual content, architecture students created “what we thought would be this really beautiful object up on the terrace of Shattuck Hall, but when we started projecting onto the object, it was, frankly, very uninteresting,” Schnabel recalls.
“We quickly realized that we had built the objects during the day, in the absence of the projected light,” Schnabel says. “So we instead decided to reconstruct the architecture specifically to respond to the projected light, and that’s when it became really exciting.”
Architects don’t typically start projects thinking about what their structures will look like in darkness, says Schnabel. Instead they focus on how they will appear in daylight. Designing for nighttime conditions is usually an afterthought.
With that realization, Schnabel was on a mission to learn all he could about designing for night. With colleagues in the School of Architecture, he held the Illuminated City symposium, drawing international experts to speak.
“We had Leni Schwendinger from New York, light projection experts from The Netherlands and Germany, and we talked about the intersection of architecture and light.”
After the symposium, Chris Herring, a local artist who had been fascinated by light-based art in his career, introduced himself to Schnabel and proposed the idea of holding a light festival in Portland.
Schnabel was intrigued, but admits, “I only had a superficial understanding of what light festivals were about.” Not long afterward, Schnabel was planning his sabbatical and was awarded the Van Evera Bailey fellowship from Architectural Foundation of Oregon, which gave him the funds to travel and experience winter light festivals in cold, wet climates such as Amsterdam and Helsinki and research their practices and their impact on their communities.
Meanwhile, momentum continued to build in Portland, with Chris Herring joining forces with Jean-Margaret Thomas, who had experience in the film industry, and Schnabel to make the festival a reality.
The festival debuted in 2016, the result of a group of dedicated artists and community groups, including Schnabel, Herring, Thomas, the Willamette Light Brigade, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and a host of volunteers.
The first year, the festival drew more than 30,000 people, and it continued to grow each year. Portland State was a major hub in the festival for the first time in 2019, with many events taking place on campus. The pandemic caused the nature of the 2021 festival to shift, with a range of installations around the city that could be viewed safely outdoors. This year, the festival is again spread out across the city, but visitors can expect more installations that engage the public, including a number at PSU and two that are being created in the College of the Arts.
On the west side of Shattuck Hall, visitors will see a multidisciplinary project that combines projected animated designs created by students in Stephen Lee’s Graphic Design class using an open-source coding language. The animation is paired with a “sound scene” created by Bonnie Miksch, the director of the School of Music & Theater, and will be visible from the Park Blocks side of Shattuck Hall on the evenings of Feb. 4 and 5, 11 and 12. (See #47 on the Portland Winter Light Festival’s Downtown map.)
“Many of the students explored themes and forms that reference the algorithmic nature of the process, often in abstract ways,” says Lee. “Bonnie did a great job of creating a soundtrack that pairs with the visuals, adding an audio component that will enhance the experience.”
“Each sound scene created to go with the animations offers a contained sonic universe exploring the timbral possibilities of singular sound sources,” explains Miksch. “For example, one sound scene is derived entirely from water and another one from a squeaky metal gate. While these scenes contain sonic properties of their original sound sources, various processes are used to expand these sound sources into larger symphonic textures.”
Meanwhile, on the evening of Feb. 5, CETI (A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute), a partner of the School of Art + Design, hosts “Constellations: Shimmering Ecologies,“ an exhibition of interactive technological creations made by a group of artists, technologists, makers, faculty and students who gathered together for a weekend of creative experimentation in January. Constellations will take place in Fariborz Maseeh Hall, which will have large- and small-scale installations spread out over the second floor of the building. (See #46 on the Downtown map.)
Creations in the show include an artist working with artificial intelligence technology to teach a computer how to paint, and “he’ll be projecting those paintings in real time as the AI is thinking about it in the painting studio onto different easels,” said Scott Nieradka, digital facilities manager for the College of the Arts. Other creations include video projections, interactive light and sound sculptures, virtual reality and experiments with older technology.
“CETI is all about experiments with technology and finding new uses for emerging technologies,” said Nieradka. “Their partnership with the School of Art + Design gives students access to professionals in technology and working artists, in order to be able to work collaboratively outside of classes, as peers.”
Alumni are in on the action as well. Ayla Leisure, who graduated from PSU’s undergraduate architecture program in 2015, will have an installation at The Nines Hotel, called “Dualism.” (See #23 on the Downtown map.)
“There are real benefits to arts students and faculty being involved with the Portland Winter Light Festival,” says Schnabel. “The first one is audience. For those of us in the College of the Arts, much of what we make is intended for public consumption, whether it’s architecture or forms of visual art or music. We want to get a sense of how others are going to respond to what we’ve created. The light festival gives us that audience.”
“The other aspect is this idea of collaborative works,” he says. “It is very hard, in the context of an academic institution, to break down silos and find those opportunities to collaborate. But the light festival has shown that it is a place where meaningful collaborations can take place. As an institution, if we believe that it’s good for a student’s education to have broad exposure to other disciplines for their work to be informed by others and vice versa, then events like this feed right into that goal.”
Schnabel’s academic focus on architectural design for nighttime conditions hasn’t waned since launching the Portland Winter Light Festival. For part of his next sabbatical, during the 2022-2023 academic year, he plans to explore “how buildings communicate through light and various forms of media, such as digital facades and projection. And I plan to work with stakeholders to develop a nighttime master plan for the PSU campus. We’ll get to test all these ideas and think about how to make safe, inviting, vibrant places after dark.”