Understanding the research problematic posed by the practices of lighting design and its role in performance requires an analysis of its historical background, because lighting design, as a practice which is both technologically-specific and responsive to changes in visual aesthetics, is historically determined. The foundations of modern lighting design practice were substantially shaped during the period from 1930 to 1960, when the lighting designer became established as a defined role within the artistic team, and control technology determined key principles of operation that are still in use. Indicative of developments in the period, and of the sorts of links proposed above between material change, ways of seeing, doing and saying, is the work and the aspiration of Fred Bentham, a highly influential figure in the development of lighting technology in the UK; his most significant achievement was the Light Console. Initially conceived as a private project to support Bentham's passion for Colour Music^[5], this control system brought what Bentham called “playability” to lighting by using cinema organ technology^[6].

In the light of the expectation that creative connections will be made, in the course of the research and write-up, in ways which may not be conventional in historical analysis, the project will argue that different models and metaphors can be used to analyse the intersection between ways of doing, seeing and saying in the historical background to inventive practice. One such metaphor is provided in Walter Benjamin's poetic image of the Angel of History^[7], facing the past, propelled backwards into the future by the storm of progress blowing from the gates of paradise. Behind is the wreckage of the storm, which the Angel is powerless to rebuild. Amongst other things, this complex metaphor suggests a fatalistic inevitability of events. Other approaches to history include that linked to the names of the famous, where influential figures take action and shape events; and those which identify cultural systems, their intersection and outcomes, without concern for individual initiative. Neither fatalistic inevitability, nor the story of influential figures, nor the analysis of cultural systems more generally permits us to explain the invention of Bentham's Light Console. The invention would seem to have occurred because of that practitioner's idiosyncratic passion for both stage lighting and cinema organs, his ability to seize the opportunities provided by available technology, his need for a means to play Colour Music, and his position within the Strand Electric Company which permitted him to resource the project^[8].

Chaos theory describes the behaviour of complex systems; such systems can be in an essentially deterministic state, where a known input will cause a known output (at least at the macroscopic level), or in a chaotic state where the system's behaviour is entirely unpredictable. In between, in the “boundary zone”, a microscopic stimulus can cause macroscopic consequences, moving the system from one stable, deterministic regime to a different one. I propose to explore a model of historical background where states, events and individual initiative must all be understood, supposing in addition that states will have a direct impact on the scale of the consequences of events. In terms of this looser model, Bentham's inventiveness itself can be considered to have been in the boundary zone, such that relatively small stimuli resulted in the Light Console. At a later time, the theatre system was by contrast not in the boundary zone: the Light Console could not then act as a stimulus to move it towards an approach to lighting as performative - that is, as performance-effective in its own terms.

Chaos Theory provides the bases for a better identification, not only of how lighting design has arrived at its present position and the forces which have prevailed to keep it there, but also where the boundary zones might be at which a microscopic stimulus might have macroscopic consequences, triggering future change.