I was going to simply post this photo along with a pithy caption… but it reminds me of how I’ve always been enticed by the idea of mediums of light, even if that light does not necessarily communicate in some identifiably semiotic way [Update: I’ve later realised that I unintentionally lifted this basic idea straight out of McLuhan’s Understanding Media – where light is considered ‘pure information’, a medium without any message – which in hindsight seems quite obvious]. On the one hand it certainly stretches the question of ‘what counts as media’. On the other hand, it is not so far away from the more obvious mediality of recent urban screen surfaces. After all, as Scott McQuire argues in a recent paper, electronic illumination has been a crucial medium through which urban environments have become increasingly mutable and fluid. Although this is little more than random pondering on my own part, I wonder whether devices like the above, at least potentially, can be seen to be in the region of what Kittler calls ‘optical media’ in his recently-translated book (which also has an excellent introduction by John Durham Peters)? Such are the questions that can only be answered by deeper reading…