Opening symposium 2015-2016
Since the dawn of time, light has fascinated and troubled human beings. In antiquity, solar cults were important, and 19th-century historians of religion gave them even greater importance, to the point of wanting to understand all ancient divinities as metaphors for the sun. Very quickly too, human beings attempted to explain the manifestations of light, revealed in particular by the practice of astronomy, by proposing various theories that led not only to cosmologies, but also to physics and the innumerable applications that have arisen from it. Artificially produced or controlled light - whether visible or invisible electromagnetic radiation - is an essential component of many of today's technologies .
Alongside these scientific developments, 18th-century European thinkers used the metaphor of light to define an intellectual process aimed at enlightening minds (Enlightenment, Aufklärung), while artistic creation has never ceased to make use of light or darkness in the representation or transfiguration of reality.