🍄 Chasing Shadows

As scientists seek to power-up shadows for energy and artists continue to shadow play, the allure of shadow shines on.

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One morning, very clearly, before the sun I was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; but my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepyhead, had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.—Robert Louis Stevenson, My Shadow

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Some think that consciousness exists in those gaps between thoughts. But what about spaces between tangible things—what lurks in those shadows? And what if it’s not lurking, nor a villainous situation… what if it’s not all sinister silhouettes of Nosferatu or the Wicked Witch of the West. What if our bodies are in fact chubby shadows of our invisible selves? And things are actually shadows brought to life by invisible thoughts? The very existence of shadows invites such mixed-up thinking. They exist but what are they doing? Are they just part of life’s mysteria? Perhaps, but from scientists powering batteries to performers addressing mental health and healing, shadows are happily having their moment in the sun.

image: Takasaki Masaharu, An Architecture of Cosmology, Architecture as an "environmental being" that connects humanity with the cosmos.

Hole-y light

Philosopher Roy Sorenson shares in his essay collection “Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows” that while shadows are widely considered an absence of light, he finds it more helpful to think of them as “holes in the light”. “What a remarkable concept,” writes researcher Menka Sanghvi. “A hole usually takes us somewhere else. The smallest of shadows becomes a special portal revealing the great dark underlying everything. Shadows need not live, metaphysically or metaphorically, in the shadow of light. They are equally, if not more, important than the surrounding light. There is an old spiritual adage that wisely reminds us that there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. What if the opposite were (also) true? There is a shadow in everything. That’s how the dark shines through.”

The shadow self is not your enemy, but a part of you longing for illumination.—Carl Jung

Shadows emphasize the presence of light. By creating contrast, shadows help highlight and bring attention to the illuminated areas, making the light seem more significant.

Expressions such as “light at the end of the tunnel,” relegates the dark to secondary status, writes lecturer and author Bayo Akomolafe in From These Wilds Beyond Our Fences [North Atlantic Books, 2017]. “The shamanic invitation to seek the dark places turns that conception on its head, and grants darkness ‘equal’ status: the dark is just as much a means to the light, as the light is a means to the dark.”

The man who sold his shadow

Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty.—Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.

If we don’t have a shadow do we even exist? “After the Renaissance, the Western world adapted so well to the idea that artistically rendered people need shadows that the absence of a personal shadow could cause a great commotion,” writes the Oxford University Press [OUP] blog. “Illustrated by many artists, Adelbert von Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemiel, the man who sold his shadow (1814), became a big hit in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Since Peter’s acquaintances would have nothing to do with a man who had no shadow, it became clear from the story that having a shadow was a sign of humanity, a signal of full participation in human life.”

Power couple

You and your shadow, name a more iconic duo… we’ll wait.

Modern-times doesn’t have us thinking much about our physical shadow. We might delve into the metaphorical “shadow self” during therapy or do metaphysical “shadow work,” but most of us are cut off from the concept of our physical shadow—rather like Peter Pan’s amputated shadow limbs.

But the presence of shadows enchants us from birth. As babies we watch and wonder, sensing from the start that a shadow is significant. We became curious when noticing light change or shadows appear, until we know how our mother’s shadow-dragon grew so wide across the bedroom wall. “Like holes, shadows exist only because of concrete objects. They are confusing because they represent a paradox-existence and non-existence,” wrote childhood education innovator Ann Lewin-Benham. 

Who’s your friend?

Then we moved on from our childhood companion without so much a backward glance. Way back when though, this was near impossible. When Greek mythology mused that shadows were a conduit between the living and dead and a physical manifestation of the soul. Buddha taught that the shadow represents the transitory nature of existence, while Hinduism sees shadows as a metaphor, for the illusory nature of the material world, and prompts peaking beneath the surface.

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder considered that to capture a person’s shadow, was to capture his essence. “He noted in his Natural History (79 CE) that art was born when a young woman named Dibutades traced the shadow of her lover on a wall, by the light of a lamp,” writes the Oxford University Press [OUP] blog. “Since the lover was about to leave on a long journey, the shadow image not only became the first human-made representation, it also became an almost magical substitute for his presence.” The idea traveled through time and technology, with poet Elizabeth Barrett writing to a friend in 1843 that a photograph was like, “the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!”

Greek philosopher Plato famously shut down the shadow’s significance, in the opening scenes of Allegory of the Cave (375BC). The story features prisoners in a cave that believe shadows of people they cannot see—caused by sunlight they’ve never known—are reality. “Plato insisted that shadows mislead people about the true nature of reality. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato set up a shadow-substance opposition that has dominated Western thinking about shadows ever since.”

Astronauts on the International Space Station snapped this photo of the moon's shadow above Earth during the 2024 total solar eclipse.  (Image credit: NASA)

Science of shadows

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
—W.B. Yeats.

Let’s shed some light. What are shadows? “Shadows are created when light is blocked,” writes Patricia Krueger. “Shadows are proof that light travels in straight lines. When an object gets in the way of the lightwaves, it creates a shadow behind the object. When the object in front of the lightwaves lets almost all of the light through, creating a shadow that’s barely visible, it’s called a transparent object. When some, but not all of the light can pass through the object, the object is called translucent. When the object is solid, not letting any light pass through, and creating a very dark shadow, it’s called opaque.” The center part of the shadow, which gets no light at all, is the darkest part and is called the umbra. The rest of the shadow is lighter because it gets light from some parts of the source of light, and is called the penumbra.

A reflection on diffraction

When Francesco Grimaldi, seventeenth-century physicist, Jesuit priest and the inventor of the word diffraction, directed a focused ray of sunlight into a dark room, he managed the ray so that it struck a thin rod and produced a shadow on a screen. “He found that the boundary of the shadow [was] not sharply defined and that a series of colored bands [lay] near the shadow of the rod,” writes Bayo Akomolafe in From These Wilds Beyond Our Fences [North Atlantic Books, 2017]. Up till then, the general views established that light waves interacted with surfaces by reflection and refraction.

Reflection is when waves hit a surface and bounce back toward to source—which is how you are able to observe yourself in a mirror. Refraction works when waves penetrate a surface, displacing some angles away from the general direction of the waves. For instance, when you dip your hand into a pool or a bucket of water, your hand might seem cut off from the rest of your arm, or just plain funny. When Grimaldi performed his experiment, it showed light behaving in unexpected ways. It was as if the light bent around the edges of things to form fuzzy edges and colored bands.

This is true for everything physical, writes Akomolafe. “Nothing is complete; everything undergoes a ‘breaking up’ in its co-emergence with ‘other things.’ Look closely at light, and it is haunted by shadows—then observe shadows, and you’ll see traces of light. Light and dark are not opposites or estranged cosmic forces that one side must defeat—for there are no ‘sides.’”

Shadow-effect energy

Scientists at the National University of Singapore say that someday, shadows and light could partner up to provide power. Materials scientist Swee Ching Tan has designed a device that exploits the contrast between bright spots and shade, to create a current that can power small electronics. “We can harvest energy anywhere on Earth, not just open spaces,” says Tan. The device, called a “shadow-effect energy generator”, was created placing a super-thin coating of gold on silicon, a typical solar cell material.

“Like in a solar cell, light shining on silicon energizes its electrons,” reports Science News. “With the gold layer, the shadow-effect energy generator produces an electric current when part of the device lies in shadow. The excited electrons jump from the silicon to the gold. With part of the device shaded, the voltage of the illuminated metal increases relative to the dark area and electrons in the generator flow from high to low voltage.” Tan’s team say that sending them through an external circuit creates a current that can power a gadget, and someday, could produce energy in the shade between skyscrapers or even indoors.

“A lot of people think that shadows are useless,” says Tan. But “anything can be useful, even shadows.”

Shadow Self

Shadows play a crucial role in shaping our perception of space; shows research published in Nature Neuroscience, as the brain instantly sees our shadows as an extension of our bodies. The study from cognitive neuroscientists at Royal Holloway University of London, UK, and Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy, suggests that our brains identify the shadow as an extension of self. Subjects in the study reacted to stimuli near the shadow of one hand as if the stimuli were affecting the hand itself, and the work implies that the brain uses visual clues from not only our appendages, but also their shadows, to map the body in space and to interact with the world. 

The results confirm an intuitive bond people feel with their shady outlines, said Margaret Livingstone, a vision researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “We all have, as children, experienced a reluctance to have others step on our shadows,” she told New Scientist. “I have a graduate student in my lab right now who still feels that way.”

Shadow-ology

“Every shadow tells a story,” writes OUP. “Whether painted, filmed, photographed, or generated in real time, shadows provide vital information that makes a representation engaging to the eye. Shadows speak about the shape, volume, location, and texture of objects, as well as about the source of light, the time of day or season, the quality of the atmosphere, and so on.” The famous example of Peter Pan’s amputated shadow reveals the arbitrary nature of shadows depicted in artworks whose creators shape, place or cut off depictions of the shadow. “Therefore, beyond offering physical information, shadows have much to tell us on a social and psychological level. Consciously or not, whenever we see shadows we ‘read’ them (and their creators’ intentions) in a cultural context that lends the shadows power or denies their substance, causing them to seem prophetic or threatening or willful or wispy.”

Outer limits

Famous cinematographer Conrad Hall says that “manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem,” writes Patricia Krueger. “In his 1960’s cult classic television show The Outer Limits, shadows are so ubiquitous and impactful on the noir mood and setting, they are like a central character in of themselves.”

Shadows have long slipped across all screens, playing a significant role in the realm of art and literature. “Renowned artists like Caravaggio and Rembrandt masterfully employed chiaroscuro, a technique that emphasizes the contrast between light and shadow, to create depth and evoke emotions in their paintings,” reports Fastercapital. “Shadows in literature often serve as a metaphorical representation of the hidden aspects of characters or the dark side of human nature. For example, in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the shadowy alter ego of the protagonist symbolizes the repressed desires and evil that lurk within us all.”

“As cinema developed, film directors rapidly picked up the atmospheric and dramatic shadow-vocabulary used by painters since the time of Caravaggio and Rembrandt,” writes OUP. “In classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, the German Expressionists made shadows into active participants in the drama. ‘Murder by shadow’ soon became an integral part of cinematic lore.”

Like a shadow, I am and I am not.—Rumi

What else we are wandering…

🔍 Reflect on this
“The universe is mostly vast quantities of blackness, coldness and silence,” writes researcher Menka Sanghvi. “In the big picture, it is an extremely rare, mind-bogglingly unlikely event, for any particles of light to exist anywhere. Darkness is a far more pervasive feature of reality than ephemeral light will ever be. Darkness is everywhere. Light is the exception… If the universe is primarily black, then it is the light that makes interesting shapes on top of the darkness. When we think of a blank canvas we usually imagine a white surface, but now imagine a black surface. The sun comes out and the canvas is filled with patterns of light dancing on it. The only parts left black are those shielded from the light. These are the shadows… Since the universe is still expanding, the distant stars and galaxies that brighten the night sky are also getting farther away all the time. Although nothing travels faster than light, it still takes time for light to cross any distance. That means the amount of light reaching us from distant stars dwindles all the time. In other words, the darkness is increasing.”

🎥 It’s showtime
At the 79th Annual Academy Awards, American dance company Pilobolus performed, through shadow, iconic images of the films nominated for Best Picture. In 2009 they globally toured Shadowland, part shadow act, part dance, part circus and part concert. Created in collaboration with the lead writer for SpongeBob SquarePants, Steven Banks, and with music by producer, and film composer David Poe, Shadowland shared the surreal experience of a young girl coming of age in a sensational world. Watch an excerpt here: YouTube.

䷶ Embracing shadows
Watch French dance duo “Claire et Antho” use shadow play to explore mental health and healing with humor “to fight the shadows of our past.” Watch here: YouTube

🌗 The Invisible Shadow: Secret of Tai Chi Training
Master Yu reveals the hidden “content” in the Tai Chi movements, as she describes the “Invisible Shadow.”  Watch here: YouTube

I like my shadow. It reminds me that I exist.—Mehmet Murat Ildan

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