luminous lines
nine years ago I saw an illuminated staircase railing for the first time.
in the manhattan light sea, on this apartment island, drifting through its terrace, I could only pay attention to this particular strip.
the railing struck me as more ethereal digital rendering than a steel, plastic, wire, physical embodiment rooted in a morass of concrete. no source, no falloff, only a thin line of radiance as if to another dimension.
in the years since, I often chase the sight of an illuminated railing without knowing why. three days ago, I saw another diagonal strip of lights flush recessed into a wall. I finally understood.
what is light to a prehistoric human? there is the sun, a searing point that illuminates the whole world. there are the moon and the stars, a pale white dot and a scatter of pinpricks hanging in the night sky. there is fire that flickers hazy amber over a lumpy glow of wood and charcoal.
we have extended the catalog of illuminary priors. points: stars, the sun, and bare bulbs. patches: windows, the sky, lampshades, and overhead fluorescent panels. the rare family of linear light is in the back pages, represented by neon signs and bioluminescent forms.
diffuse LED strips violate all of our expectations of emission：
they do not have a point source. there is no hot center for the eye to rest on. why is the light a straight line?
they are too narrow to be a surface. our brains do not register the diffuser surface as scattering a source behind, but rather as a self-excited emitter.
they do not exhibit falloff. unlike indirect light sources which use other surfaces as reflective plane, there is minimal brightness gradient.
when flush mounted, they are not even objects. they are mundane participants in the context of our everyday lives which have suddenly gained the ability to glow! why has this railing sprouted a ray along its underside? why is there a emissive fracture in the drywall?
it is only in the past two decades that we have gained the ability to emit light in a form that breaks a visual prior. incandescent and fluorescent bulbs ran too large and too hot to flush into ordinary materials.
industry has caught on to the sublime aesthetic and begun to hatch linear diffuse LEDs as far as the eye can see. we welcome this propagation with one eye open. most of what follows will be counterfeit.
in case you would like to style a supervillian lair or fortune 500 office, these are called "recessed linear luminaires". you can also call them "tacky", because assembling diffuse LED strips to perform ambient illumination is self-defeating. lighting an area should be done with maximally diffuse panels and not accent pieces which are bright enough to dazzle the eye when admired.
porsche decided in 2016 to add a strip to their flagship 911. it will never look cool again. the slow march of progress means ten of the bestselling fifty cars in the US this year have the same feature (i counted). the point of the lightstrip is an ethereal glow. red just means you hit the brake pedal.
the conditions are narrow. flush thin soft glow, somewhere few lights have ever been. catch one if you can!