STEFANO FAKE & THE FAKE FACTORY “THE ART OF COLOURS” Light Art Installation (2012 – today)

The Art of Colours is an evolving immersive installation that explores the transformative power of light and color, using space to engage the visitor’s perceptual faculties. The installation generates a sensory dialogue between the artwork and the viewer, inviting a phenomenological experience where art and perception merge.

Originally conceived in 2012, this installation has been presented in varied, site-specific contexts—most notably during Milan’s Fuorisalone (the global hub of Design Week) and Florence’s Light Festival, which began that same year. 

In typical Fake Factory style, the artwork transcends passivity: the visitor’s physical presence becomes integral to the color and light interplay. Walking into the installation, the viewer’s silhouette, movement, or proximity can modulate how color fields shift, blend, and interact—thus shifting the artwork dynamically in response to human presence .

Much like Stefano Fake’s earlier immersive works, The Art of Colours is oriented around the visitor’s embodied experience. It offers a dynamic perceptual field where the boundary between self and environment blurs—a cornerstone of Merleau-Ponty’s theories on embodied perception. Participants do not merely observe the installation; they enact and co-create it.

Rather than plot or narrative, The Art of Colours communicates through color and forms. This aligns with an interpretation of light as a semiotic medium—evoking emotional responses and sensory resonance in lieu of explicit representation. The absence of figurative imagery places emphasis on abstract affective experience.

In the new millenium, digital art had begun shifting away from the spectacle of technology toward immersive, embodied experiences. The Art of Colours exemplifies this shift: the technology—projections, sensors, lighting—is designed to vanish into the experience itself. What remains is the perception—pure, immediate, and orchestrated through color and movement.

In The Art of Colours, light and color are not fixed—they shift in relation to the physical presence of the audience. The human body becomes part of the feedback loop, functioning almost like a brushstroke in a living digital canvas.

• Traditional art situates the viewer as an external spectator, but here, simply being in the space alters the artwork.
• Viewers walking, standing still, or interacting with one another cause color fields to ripple, blend, or shift.
• This creates a personalized and collective aesthetic journey:
• Personalized: each visitor’s presence generates unique variations.
• Collective: multiple visitors can transform the environment together, creating layered dynamics of light.

This makes the artwork inherently unrepeatable: no two moments are identical because the composition emerges from lived presence.

Phenomenological lens:

The installation amplifies Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the body as the locus of perception. The viewer perceives light, but also perceives themselves as a generator of light transformations. The boundaries between self and artwork blur.

Digital aesthetic lens:

The role of technology is not to be showcased but to disappear into experience. Instead of seeing “a computer program,” the visitor perceives “a world of shifting colors that respond to me.” This situates The Art of Colours within post-digital practice, where the focus lies on human experience, not technological novelty.

Implications of Modulated Environments

• Agency: The visitor gains agency in shaping their aesthetic environment—art is no longer delivered, but co-created.
• Relationality: The artwork is relational (Bourriaud): what matters is not an object on the wall, but the relationship between light, space, and the embodied visitor.
• Ephemeral Art: Since each moment is tied to a presence, the artwork only “exists” in its full sense when it is inhabited—without presence, it collapses back into potentiality.

 The viewer presence actively modulates sensory environment:

• The body is not external but constitutive of the artwork.
• Presence and absence directly alter the visual outcome.
• The environment is responsive, ephemeral, and relational—existing only through the ongoing co-production between visitor and system.