Drawing With Light

The past week was loaded with a lot of activities that packed my thoughts and started rewiring my brain into thinking differently about everything I see. We kicked off the week with a mind-mapping session where my group had “The Age of Edison” as their central point and it was very exciting and liberating; we were able to link distant ideas with each other from “the myth of the inventor”, “Edison the businessman” to “the effects inventions have on people”, “Invention Oppositions” and “why is it called the age of invention” … only to name a few. Then, we used these maps to come up with critical questions that target subtle details and hidden concepts. I came out of that exercise finding out that every single idea I get may have a link to another distant idea where they, if combined with critical thinking, may reveal the answer to a lot of unanswered questions.

With the same mind-mapping technique, the topic of the class gradually changed from the invention of light by Edison to harnessing of light and technology in the art of photography (historically thought of as drawing with light); we discussed how Electricity was used to amaze people as if it was magic and how different inventors showed off their abilities in harnessing Electricity. We saw how inventions were first introduced as magic, and as soon as people keep up with the science of it, the inventor/magician was always one step ahead. An example of that was cinematography, first introduced by the Lumiere Brothers in their movie “Arrival of a Train at La Ciot”. Their movie may appear very simple and scratchy to us nowadays, but, then, it was a peculiar kind of magic, inspiring people and making them live in their dreams. People were inspired enough to create masterpieces in old cinema that were long engraved in the minds of people in their age, people like George Melies, but that would need another blog entry :D