Light Shows/Multimedia Shows
1 Color Light Instruments
Among the first visionaries to anticipate that light could be created and manipulated in the way that organized sound is produced on a musical instrument was the French Jesuit mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel, who in the mid-1720s drafted a Clavecin oculaire. Castel’s concepts were modified and applied by inventors and theorists such as Johann Gottlob Krüger in the following century. From the mid-nineteenth century, the possibilities of such mechanical color organs were radically expanded through technical innovations and the advent of electrically produced and projected light. Alexander Wallace Rimington was the first to implement electric light in his color organ from 1893.
Whereas these earlier color organs were mostly based on assumptions about correspondences between colors and musical tones, in the decades before World War II more and more artists advocated an independent art of light. Among these was Thomas Wilfred, who developed ideas for an abstract and silent art of light, which he called