Bodily Immersion in Light

Trained in art, architecture, and dance, Cynthia Pachikara explores the interplay between vision, bodily movement, and space through her “shadow installations.” In these works, spectators become unwittingly entangled in invisible, crisscrossing projector beams and begin to encounter moving imagery where none should be: inside the space of their own, familiar, and engaged shadows. Conceived as spatial riddles, these installations visualize the notion of the body-as-screen and address the social contingency of the audience’s gaze.

Pachikara is interested how spatial separation and compression can be experienced in artworks and designs immersive conditions that foster proprioception through free play.

In a related project, entitled Light Cities, Pachikara has been developing techniques to distill the light along urban passageways to understand how movement-through-illumination contributes to geographic identity. The approach involves mobilizing large-scale, semi sheer screens along common thoroughfares to collide with environmental light, mid flight, as residents do. Rather than filming the landscape directly, Pachikara records from the moving screens, capturing impressions of the landscape through shadows, reflections, and refractions that have been shaped by the immediate environment. The resulting palette of images reveals the luminous environmental by-products that inhabitants move through unaware. This footage is being collected for use in future shadow installation projects.

Pachikara will present both documentation of recent shadow installations and the results of her recent Light Cities experiments.