An Appreciation - by Silke Hohmann

We have all tried it out: Standing with our legs apart, slightly bent at the knees and swaying gently, focusing in great concentration on the garage door two steps away and then, repeatedly, dropping a hand to our hip, coming back up with index finger straight: Bang! To no avail. Practice might make perfect, but does not guarantee success, even in the case of surprise attacks. Now the fact that someone, ostensibly Superman, could move faster than light, is one thing. But being faster than your own shadow, only Lucky Luke the comic cowboy achieved that, for which we must duly respect him. Someone capable of outpacing their own shadow must truly be a shining light, after all, no one has ever seen anyone else beat light to it so masterfully.

Light (and that means shadow, too) is after all one of the strangest things out, because it is a trivial everyday occurrence, as it were, and yet at the same time one of the most mysterious phenomena you can imagine – or rather cannot imagine. For what exactly the photons raining down on us that cause light actually are is something the elite among the electro-physicists are still arguing about. 

Despite the fact that light interests us from the moment we first see day, or the light of it – or rather blink at it. In other words, at the beginning it seems to be a highly unpleasant annoying phenomenon that we grow all the more fond of later, when we increasingly learn to fear the dark. Usually, we concern ourselves with light a few times in the course of our lives, be it to out-draw our shadows with the Lucky-Luke experiment, be it to set paper on fire with a magnifying glass and sunlight, or later in an apartment when it comes to replacing the naked bulb hanging from a wire in the center of a new apartment ceiling with something that looks nicer and makes everything else look nicer, too.

We may be more or less successful, here, but the vague feeling remains that light is very very complicated. It will always be a major riddle that has to remain unsolved, until we die, when Heaven’s Door swings ajar and it gets too dark to see. And even if Goethe on his deathbed may not have called at the very end for “more light” – the idea seems appropriate and very true. 

Even if we purport to know a lot we have to concede that we have no idea about light. Our criteria for judging it, be it “too dark” or “too glaring” are about as subtle as the words “hot” or “cold” or “too much” or “too little” would be to rate a set dinner dished up for us by a Michelin chef. Now that is not a disaster, as we cannot all be experts, and there is no need for us to master everything. However, we should be aware of the fact that this is the state of play. And accept that when it comes to light there are considerable differences in mastery and a knowledge of it. Even if we think that light is something so familiar that we automatically know how to handle it, we still need to realize that there are others who can perhaps do it better on our behalf. Such as the starred chefs in the kitchen of light and I am thinking here of serien.lighting. Because they truly master the matter.

Not just in the sense of a science of light, thanks to which they know exactly when which light of what quality fits the occasion. But also in the sense of that second art of finding the right setting for the light, namely the right design.

For that enigmatic material which is light is by no means visible. It only disseminates when it encounters resistance. Without the resistor, it remains invisible and shapeless. Only when light encounters an object does it become vibrant and valuable. On occasion, it is only represented by a stand-in: the lamp. Or rather I should say by a luminaire. After all, primarily it is the transmitter which we consider the source of light. And the transmitter tries to blend in and not take the limelight.

To stick with the kitchen metaphor. If a person sitting down to eat soup is struck most by the spoon, be it thanks to its special design, unusual materials or unfamiliar shape, then something has gone skew-whiff, as then the tool is stealing the show from the real thing, namely the soup. It would be better if the spoon left you feeling happy and also stood up to closer inspection, should you wish to do so. In other words, the spoon should be unobtrusive and yet sweetly shaped and of a superior quality. A modest but confident designer does not need cheap frills to catch the eye.

And this is the approach serien.lighting takes to luminaires: Unobtrusive they are, committed to their function and yet, on closer inspection, high-grade and well construed in all respects. And you simply do not see all the thought and hard work that has gone into them. At times, some of them do not even reveal their ingenious technology, keeping the electrifying details for themselves instead of crying out the light details in the market place.

Then again there are those special occasions when a playful element is called for and light in all its uniqueness stages itself and nothing else. Light, for example, that approaches at a zigzag, or in different colors, confidently displaying its responsible approach to design. And serien.lighting likewise creates such luminaires as a matter of course, something you can only do on the back of long-standing experience in handling light and a profound love of the material itself, that curious, idiosyncratic and complicated material that is “light”. And in the process do not even need to trick light, as the super-heroes and comic heroes do. Instead, they respectfully tame it and set it on the right track. In this way, the team at serien.lighting has perhaps not yet succeeded in beating Lucky Luke’s shadow to the draw – or yet again, perhaps they have. Were they to try, they would most certainly find a graceful form for the attempt.