Language of Light 1

C-type photo print (montage) While gazing out to sea at Lizard Point, Cornwall UK, I was intensely aware of the cosmos. Light rained down on the glittering water – reminding me that sunshine from our nearest star and unhindered cosmic rays bombard the planet everyday. Scientists have another way of describing this scene through mathematics. The numbers in this montage represent light levels collected from astral data used to test the Euclid Mission VIS instrument, a telescope that will be recording millions of galaxies daily from 2022. Indicating stars, galaxies and cosmic rays they express a mathematical interpretation of light. However, the mathematical is indebted to sensory experience. Philosopher Merleau-Ponty believed that the body is the first site of knowing. Sensation happens before understanding, before analysing, before calculating. He said ‘science manipulates things and gives up living in them’ but the artist ‘lends his body to the world’ and by filtering experience through art, can bring us back to the innocence of the sensory.