Trent Kim

Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) was an artist-inventor who emerged in the inter-war period of the United States and his works were developed under Lumia and projected scenery. For Wilfred, the former was referred to an independent art form of light and the latter was referred to a projection art within stage design. In respect to Thomas Wilfred’s artistic practices, the relevant literature primarily focuses on Lumia and Lumia as an early 20th century abstract art and abstract film, hence from perspectives of modern painting and early cinema. Wilfred’s declaration of Lumia as the eighth addition to the classical arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, dance and drama, was either ignored or assumed to be one of the precursors to the history of cinema, Despite the terminological distinction between Lumia and projected scenery, both shared a same technical foundation, and made original contributions to the field of theatre. In the beginning, this PhD project acknowledged the limitation of researching Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia solely by the existing literature, and developed an original methodology for historical research on what I define as ‘mythopoetic practices’ by artist-inventors where art, history and technology were fused to seek a new schema of being human beyond technically advancing and standardising creative practices. I have named my historical methodology ‘mythopoetic prototyping’ to stress the important focus on ‘schema’ by art and technology and ‘insight’ of being an artist-inventor and practitioner-historian. After Thomas Wilfred, the history of Lumia has sporadically continued/discontinued due to the absence of an official route for Lumia to be passed down to next generations of artists, but, the small collection of Wilfred’s survived Lumia automatons and few journal and magazine articles by Wilfred, encouraged new Lumia artists to be inspired and reinvent the art themselves. The thesis of this project, argues for a need to research histories as a practitioner-historian, and through the case study of Lumia, it demonstrates how one can discover deep surfaces that connect texts, artefacts and surviving practices and translate them into a research methodology to evaluate contemporary meanings of the histories. In conjunction with the thesis, I have created a living digital archive of Lumia to share the process of my PhD project, representing Lumia as an independent performative art form that continues to inspire new generations of artists who are interested in light.