A few weeks ago, I visited the James Turrell exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Turrell's specialty is the perception-transforming properties of light. He plays with the distortions in space and color that occur with the way a room is constructed and the angle of beams of light.
In the biggest piece of the exhibit, there is a room (only 7 visitors allowed inside at a time, for eight and a half minute intervals), painted entirely white, slanted downward, the walls sloping into the floors, lit entirely in color-changing LED lights that slowly shift from blue to violet to magenta to red to pink and back to blue agin. The back wall of the room is a lighter shade than that of the room.
But step closer and you can put your arm through the wall as though it doesn't exist . . . because it doesn't. It's an illusion - the back wall is actually another room, the walls sloping into the floors and ceilings to eliminate the shades created by corners and right angles. That room is lit with different lights, changing in harmony with the main room.Turn your eyes back to the waiting room where other visitors patiently await their turn, and the white lighting out there seems to change hues as well. Except it doesn't, because it's a trick of the eyes. Turrell is playing with "color opponency," the tendency of retinal ganglian to distort colors depending on which color dominates the input. Stare at red light and any white light appears green, because all other rays within white light are cancelled out. Stare at blue light, and then any white light appears yellow.
This long intro leads to the idea of installing LED lighting in my home office, where I often sit in the mornings to write. It's long been known through various studies that light (or even just staring at walls of a certain color) can influence the mind. I could inspire creativity with blue light, stimulate my mind for the day with red light, or use violet to both stimulate and inspire.
LED light strips are pretty cheap nowadays, and easy to install. They even come with remote controls to change the color without rising from my chair. Additionally, I don't want to disrupt my concentration by periodically hitting my eyes with direct beams of light (have you ever thought about how often our eyes are stuck by light from lamps and overhead bulbs? Seems like a carryover from the 19th/early 20th centuries). So I will hide the strips behind things (dresser, closet door, back edge of my desk and a table) so that only the rays reflecting off the walls will light the room.
Steps
1) Research the parts and equipment needed.
2) Determine where the lights will go and how to connect them.
3) Purchase the equipment.
4) Set the light strips in the locations desired and connect them to a power source.
Enthusiam: At a high level, especially since some preliminary research shows that this is a fairly practical project.
Practicality: Turns out color changing RGB LED strips come in sets with a 44-button remote control capable of changing the colors and setting certain color combos to memory. The strips can be cut after every three lights to the desired length. What I want to do will probably cost only roughly $50-60. Bonus: lighting the room with LED lights may even be more cost effective than with light bulbs.
Difficulty: We'll find out once I actually purchase the equipment and set it up.
Here's a good NPR story on Turrell's work: http://www.npr.org/2013/09/07/219367766/james-turrell-experiments-with-the-thingness-of-light-itself
