The Shadow Language

For most of the day, The Shadow Language looks like an abstract carved wood sculpture — interesting, but you can't quite read it. Then, at one specific time that we calculate for your wall, the sun hits it at the right angle and its shadow snaps into a shape you recognize: a name, a word, a family symbol, an emblem chosen for you. A minute later the sun moves on and the message dissolves back into abstraction. It's a secret the wall keeps and reveals once a day.

There are two real traditions underneath this. The first is Indian and Mughal: the jali, the carved lattice screen, was famous not only for the light it let through but for the patterned shadows it cast on floors and walls inside palaces and tombs [Jali, Wikipedia]. Anyone who has stood inside a jali-screened room has watched carved stone turn sunlight into a moving carpet of shadow — that's the effect The Shadow Language is built on, but aimed at one deliberate image.

The second is modern shadow art and anamorphosis. Artists like Kumi Yamashita build sculptures from ordinary objects that only resolve into a picture through their shadow; in her own words, "the complete artwork is therefore comprised of both the material (the solid objects) and the immaterial (the light or shadow)" [Kumi Yamashita]. The British duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster famously turned heaps of junk into precise shadow silhouettes [My Modern Met]. Anamorphosis — an image that only reads correctly from one exact viewpoint — is an old technique; the most famous example is the stretched skull hidden in Hans Holbein's 1533 painting The Ambassadors, which only resolves when you view it from the side [The Virtual Instructor]. The Shadow Language uses the sun as that single viewpoint: the message appears only when the light is in exactly the right place, at a time we work out from your wall's orientation and the sun's path through the sky.