This paper introduces the programming styles commonly found in performance lighting
practice and discusses the impact that digital programming practice has on the creative
visualisation and realisation of the lighting designers work.
Facilitating creativity in digital programming practice, which demands a logical and
numerical structure to its input language, is a challenge that has only relatively recently
been taken up by manufacturers. In the profession lighting designers and programmers are
often two separate people, each with a particular skill set. The designer will sit with the
programmer and together they translate the creative intention into numbers and code that
then seeks to render the design through lighting systems. This paper investigates the impact
of this need for the translation of the creative idea into the language of lighting control,
what is lost, what may be compromised. It seeks to suggest what may be gained by further
development of creative and graphical user interfaces in lighting control.
Through a discussion of philosophical notions such as Borgmann’s ‘technological device’ and
Dasgupta’s assertions regarding the nature of the relationship between craft and
engineering, the challenges facing lighting designers and programmers are presented and
the mechanisms of performance lighting laid bare.