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Diurnism


The introduction of the street lighting in the city during the 19-century was at the origin of one the most important social and political revolution of the urban practice and of the form of the city. The ambition was demiurgic: to make the day during the night. And we live henceforth in this endless artificial day in the city. The street lighting caused new urban typologies (the boulevard for example) but was also the cause of new behaviors, those of the noctambulism, sauntering the evening on the boulevards, dancing in the balls. It is an ambition of the same order that I want to produce today but more contemporary, more ambiguous: to create the night during the day. My project is to reinvent a new form of night in the continuous artificial day of the modernity. It is to produce the night during the day, physically. It's a reversed answer to the perpetual day created by the modernity, Internet and the contemporary globalization, a second perversion. After the “Noctambulisme” I would like to invent the “Diurnism”, using an orange-yellow bright light which wavelengths, upper than 570 nanometers, are perceived by the body through the melatonin rhythm as a true night. The room becomes a paradox between the visible and the invisible, the visual and the physiological: a night which looks like a bright day. Reversed "nocturnes for the piano” by the early 19 century Irish musician John Field, the inventor of this "form" of music, are diffused in the space.

Photos: Adam Rzepka, Centre Pompidou

Curators

Alfred Pacquement, Christine Macel et Daniel Birnbaum (art), Valérie Guillaume (design, landscape, urbanism and architecture)

client

Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou)

location, date

"Airs de Paris" exhibition, Paris, France, 2007

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