This thesis analyzes light not only as a visualization tool, but also as affective language and symbolic code that configures affective regimes and perceptual modes. Particularly in modern generative vision machines, light is an independent and active medium that configures emotion, refigures restructure's identity, and composes the rhythms of immersion and disembodiment.
The material and symbolic affordances of light are used to examine Marshall McLuhan's words as "The medium is the message." McLuhan represents electric light as "a medium without a message," not because it had no meaning but rather because it demonstrated how a medium itself impacts perception and the structure of the surrounding environment. Starting from that realization, this thesis suggests that light is a medium that can reorganize perceptual environments and encode emotion through modulation, rhythm, and form.
Each of the three core optical phenomena: flicker, refraction, and dispersion is analyzed and interpreted as a code of emotional and sensory structuring. By interfering with the linearity of time and space with its chaotic rhythm, flicker creates lacunae, or perceptual gaps, that reorients the viewer's perception of temporality. This is shown in contexts such as rave culture of the 1990s and early 2000s or in Emmanual’s light design in Evian Christ's Trance Party, where compressed time signatures and rhythmic strobes create an immersive experience of altered presence and collective intensity.
Refraction, in fact, is more than a simple optical deflection of light, but bending of the very field of perception itself. Through a device like the Fresnel lens, objects like Troika's Arcades demonstrate how the physical act of bending light can subtly reorganize spatial perception and emotional response, generating what might be called emotional refraction. In such cases, space is experienced, misaligned, and reconfigured.
Dispersion represents the most extreme form of sensory disorganization. In installations like Aka Chang’s Ring Kosmologia, fog and high-output lasers blur the boundaries between space and body, creating an overwhelming sense of visual overflow. Because of its overwhelming intensity and perceptual saturation, light confuses rather than revealing the boundaries of the feeling self.
These visual mechanisms function as ritualistic instruments for sensory organization not only just aesthetic choices or technical effects. In post-image media environments, light functions as a generator of affective and symbolic orders, creating a new type of sensory ritual. The thesis uses three theoretical frameworks to expand this contention. Marshall McLuhan's research presents light as an environmental organizer that transcends information. Lev Manovich's notions of modularity and automation can also help us comprehend how light can be constructed utilizing programmable parameters such as hue, brightness, flicker, density, and pattern to create an emotionally coded language. Hansen's concept of the interface, which highlights how digital media can rewire perception at the bodily level, supports the idea that light is also affective and bodily.
Comparative case studies present a framework for these conceptual proposals. By using 152 anti-aircraft searchlights to create the architectural illusion of vertical transcendence, Albert Speer's Cathedral of Light (1936) erased individuality and manipulated collective affect. In this historical moment, light was used to visually impose ideological power and strengthen dictatorship authority by de-individualizing people. Meanwhile, modern performances like Evian Christ's Trance Party use strobe lighting, trance rhythms, and fog to dissolve the subject into a fluid, affect-driven body rather than into ideological unity. In this case, the audience takes on the characteristics of an emotional body, which is characterized by its immersion in rhythmic sensory experience instead of by an identifiable self. Although both cases use light to influence emotional and perceptual realities, Trance Party's unstable, affective space for disorientation, release, and reconfiguration differs from Speer's spectacle, which orchestrated obedience and transcendence.
Overall, this thesis argues that light is a medium that makes us feel, believe, and even forget. In the more algorithmic media environments of the present day, light is something that seems to emerge as an ontological interface, a generative mechanism that organizes the rhythms of subjectivity, emotion, memory, and time. It is a visual medium but a sculptural and symbolic material that inscribes the tensions of presence and absence, identity and disintegration. It therefore becomes a ritualistic, perceptual, and political medium that refigures how we see, how we feel, and who we are.