Institute of Lighting Design is an open platform, where anyone interested in light design is invited to join – either with a creative contribution of an Artist or with an erudition of a Technician, or with a theme for subsequent activities, with an offer of cooperation, or with an own vision of ideal organisation ILD’s functioning.

Project Institute of Lighting Design is realised by
Česká organizace scénografů, divadelních architektů a techniků (ČOSDAT), o.s., 
a Czech centre of OISTAT

The Institute of Lighting Design (ILD) was founded in May of 2008 from to the initiative of several figures coming from the background of light design, theatre production, artists and technologists who are focused on the work with the newest technologies.

The first impulse was given not only by absence of creativity and communication at the domain’s platform, but also by the lack of adequately educated personalities. That is why the aim of ILD is to fill such a void not only in the domain of lighting design, but also of the related technologies (sound – sound design, picture – projection, work with the picture). Among other, one of ILD’s goal is to form the base of contacts across the “lighting spectrum” – of the creative producers, societies, practitioners (technicians); and to participate at regional and international projects, to provide the information service about the related events (performances, exhibitions, conferences, fairs, etc.)

The ILD is primarily focused on the theatre – as in its classic form and in the conditions of site-specific as well. Among the executions of its works, there are the light installations, and a scale of others inter-genre projects. The ILD cooperates with festivals and competitions of various theme topics (Designblok, PQ). By its workshops, the ILD participates at university courses at the departments with the related fields of study.

Formally, ILD forms a part of project at Czech Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (ČOSDAT o. s.) that is a Czech section of OISTAT (www.oistat.org, http://cosdat.idu.cz/cs/). As a result of experience and impulses of Prague Quadrennial 2007, ČOSDAT decided to form a platform of Czech artists and technicians, in order to create a space that enables them to grow professionally and to observe their own projects and experience achieved together with their Czech and international colleagues.

The ideas of the ILD stem  from education programs  that are available as fully developed  fields of study at different universities, art academies and colleges of technologies (e.g. Theatre Academy of Finland, Helsinky; Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design; The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London; KTH – Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm).

The efforts to adopt and incorporate this domain into public knowledge results in following activities – educational literature publications, secondary articles and discussions, common communication within the subculture of active figures (of artists or enthusiasts) and, obviously, of those passively interested (spectators), finding supports in the infrastructure of services at the marketplace.

Perception of lighting design as an independent artistic field facilitates the access to the information as well as the tendency to experiment and that means also individual and practical advancement of an establishing specialization. Actual situation at the market of technologies is favorable, but creative producers are meeting merely at technical fields (isolated) and artistic use of technologies (theatre arts included) lacks the tradition.

There is a range of creative producers and several professional / academic institutions (laboratories, ateliers, courses) which are though closely defined by the sphere and interests of those involved. The platform for complex cooperation – information transfer of those technically erudite and those artistically creative – is absent, consequently, public evolution as well. We feel the lack of adequately educated (technically and artistically) personalities, lighting designers of high level who are able to handle accessible technologies and in the same time, to work in an artistic way. We are aware of that they are few in the Czech artistic conditions.

By its continual activities, the ILD’s aim is to raise creative producers, by doing such to create a base for communication of a creative team (in theatre terminology Artist – Technician) and to open the ways towards complex cooperation in production.