Lori Hepner is a professor of integrative arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny and this year’s Penn State Laureate. Her digital light drawings and other works have been featured in several countries. Hepner recently delivered her lecture “Making the Invisible Visible” as part of the Penn State Forum Speaker series. WPSU intern James Engel spoke with her about her artistic process and current work.
Here is their conversation:
James Engel
Lori Hepner, thank you for talking with us.
Lori Hepner
Thanks for having me.
James Engel
Before we discuss your work, could you explain what a light drawing is for those who are unfamiliar? What do they look like, and how are they made?
Lori Hepner
So, I've been doing this with these programmable LEDs for a bunch of years. And so one of the LED sticks is six-feet tall and has about 200 little pixels in it that can change. So, I'm able to slot in photos rather than just sort of colors that turn on and off.
So, I use that in long exposures in the photography world. But also, these days, I have a real time system where I can move in space. And there'll be this digital light drawing, and it gets made behind me so that you can see, as I'm doing it, what the artwork looks like, rather than the old way, which was a camera on a tripod in a totally dark room running around with lights.
James Engel
Interesting, can you describe what they look like?
Lori Hepner
Yeah, so the results of this often end up as either videos or photographs. And so the photographs are usually on a dark background, but there's these kinds of swatches of light that make shapes. And a lot of times, I'm using photographs so that you see a little piece of a tree come out, but then the rest of it might be a somewhat abstract swirl into a triangle of color. That kind of light is really the thing that's making it. So, sometimes it's very abstract. And depending on what I do, it can be something that you're like, “Oh, yeah, I can see multiple trees there. I can see a landscape. I know what's going on.”
James Engel
You mentioned that some of your early experiments with light drawing were simply long exposure shots on a camera. How has your work evolved over years of practice?
Lori Hepner
The process is similar, but the outcome ends up being a little bit different. I've gotten used to walking around with LEDs in my space. But also the technology has gotten more advanced. So nowadays, the six foot tall thing, I did not build. But since then, I built my own LED devices so that I can do wearable LED drawing. So, my body movement can make the drawing, but also because they're higher resolution.
And so with those, you can really start to see images come through and sometimes even text come through. So, you see a part of a word that gets formed that's not a straight line like a computer drawing, but it's more organic movement. And that happens from me moving in space.
So because I've been doing it for a while, I forget how hard it can be for other people to do it. When I'm working on these community projects, it's really fun, sort of watching people pick up how to do it, which they can do rather quickly. Within a minute or two, people start to really get the sense of like, “Oh, this is really me moving in space with this light, and not something that's difficult or like you have to have 10 years of digital experience to be able to create.”
James Engel
It looks almost like a dance that you would have to do, but it's not quite choreographed. Is that part of it – that it's a sort of reflection of natural movement?
Lori Hepner
A little bit. I'm interested in the idea of how movement, memory and emotion get linked together. So when I'm doing these light paintings, I'm thinking about particular things. And so for a project that I was doing while I was primarily in the Arctic Circle in Finland, I was really thinking about reliving the movements that I was making while I was going out on photography trips.
So, I was going out with my camera, sometimes hiking, sometimes with other people and seeing the landscapes and photographing those. And so when I came back in the studio, which was then a totally dark room, I would put those photos onto my LED stick and then kind of dance around thinking about the movements I was making while I was out there photographing and the kind of the feelings I was having while I was there.
And so the movements aren't just totally random. But I also have learned over the years what types of movement make different types of pictures and the outcome of the art.
James Engel
What are you currently working on? And what are your creative plans for the future?
Lori Hepner
So, this summer, I'm working on a new commission that's for the city of Pittsburgh. I live in the Brighton Heights neighborhood, which is on the north side of the city. But there was an 1898 car bridge that they had to demolish because it was no longer safe, there was a valley of houses below. And so that was 2009. So, the Davis Avenue Bridge is finally going to be reconstructed as a pedestrian and bike bridge. And that will connect the Brighton Heights neighborhood to Riverview Park, which is one of the biggest parks in the city. And so as part of that I got chosen to be the artist to make the artwork for this new bridge that's being made.
And so as a part of this, I'm doing these light painting workshops in the neighborhood and at Riverview Park. And we'll be making these augmented reality animations. And they'll be triggered by a stainless steel sculpture. So, for the first time, I'm having artwork created and fabricated by somebody else in stainless steel. And so that'll be the visual trigger where people can come up and point their phones at this. And then every month, there's going to be a different changing animation from the community. And so that's been in the works for about two years. But as government projects take, it always takes a little longer, so it's only going to be installed this summer versus last summer.
James Engel
Lori Hepner, thank you very much.
Lori Hepner
Thank you.
