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What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole 'family' of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds.
List of contents
360 OF ILLUMINATION (Veronica Strang) LIGHT MATTERS (Veronica Strang) An Early Sun (Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis) Light and Matter (Robert Fosbury) LIGHT AS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (Veronica Strang) Shedding Light on the Limitations of Microalgal Production (Kevin Flynn) Sunflowers (Joanna Puckering) In the Cambrian Light... (Glenn A. Brock) Light and the Evolution of Vision: A Conversation with Rob Barton (Joanna Puckering) ON THE EDGE OF THE DARK (Veronica Strang) Lighting Space (Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis) ATTRACTIVE AND REPULSIVE LIGHT (Veronica Strang) Biological Lighthouses (Margo Haygood and Bradley Tebo) Cosmic Signallers (Ulisses Barres de Almeida and Martin Ward) Lighthouses of the Insect World (Joanna Puckering) PHENOMENOLOGICAL LIGHT (Veronica Strang) Visual Rays: The Light within the Eye (Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis) DIVINE RAYS (Veronica Strang) Lighthouses in the Bible: Symbols of Enlightenment and Salvation (Joanna Puckering and David Wilkinson) The Aesthetics and Ethics of Visible and Inner Light: A Conversation with Douglas Davies (Joanna Puckering) Light as Metaphor and as Technology, c. 1700-1900 (Tom Mole) Guiding Light: The Early Modern Lighthouse as Image and Emblem (Richard Maber) LIGHTHOUSES IN TIME AND SPACE (Veronica Strang) The Colossus of Rhodes According to Giacomo Torelli (Jan Clarke) 'Places of Light': Lighthouses and Minarets (Joanna Puckering) 'On lofty cliffs, where the sea pounds the rock...' Lighthouses in Early Medieval England (David Petts) The Redistribution of Light and Dark at Sea (Tim Edensor) TECHNOLOGIES OF LIGHT AND POWER (Tim Edensor) Technologies of Light (Brian Bowers) The Fresnel Lens: Enabling Lighthouse Technology (Gordon D. Love) Early Lighthouse Lamp Technology (Steve Hoon) BUILDING THE LIGHTHOUSE (Tim Edensor) The Physicality of Lighthouses (Steve Hoon) The Modern Lighthouse: A Sculpture by Accident (Steve Millington) Sky-tower as Icon (David Cooper) Turner's Lights (James Purdon) Illuminating Science: Scientific
About the author
Veronica Strang directs Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study and is the author of
The Meaning of Water (2004),
Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water (2009) and
Water: Nature and Culture (2015).
Tim Edensor belongs to the Geography Department of Manchester Metropolitan University and is the author of
From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017),
Industrial Ruins (2005) and editor of
Geographies of Rhythm (2010).
Joanna Puckering works for the Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study. Joanna completed her PhD at the Department of Anthropology, Durham University.
Summary
What is a lighthouse? What does it do, and how? What does a lighthouse mean symbolically? This volume analyses how lighthouses appear in multiple forms: from signals of safety to beacons of enlightenment, as phallic assertions of boundaries to monuments of community identity and as technological advancements.
