Seeing the Invisible is a chamber piece for light and lament, composed in dialogue with John Tavener’s Funeral Canticle. Working inside a completely black set, treating each beam of light as a solo voice: narrow shafts sketched parabolic arcs; diffused planes drifted like slow breath; pin-pricks of glare blossomed and withered in a single frame. These gestures were captured individually, then layered in post-production so that light itself becomes an ensemble tracing the score’s widening and closing harmonics.

Rather than illustrate Tavener’s theology, the work pursues the music’s phenomenological core-the sensation of something present yet untouchable. In darkness, we cannot point to “objects”; we apprehend only the behaviour of photons. A diagonal flare crossing the void is both nothing and everything: pure energy, devoid of mass, yet capable of carving spatial depth from emptiness. By isolating these phenomena, I invite viewers to notice perception noticing itself, the way a single glint can make the surrounding black feel thicker, as though absence acquires substance.

Compositionally, the edit mirrors the canticle’s structure. Long chorale passages are accompanied by sustained light sheets that dilate almost imperceptibly, hinting at an unfurling interior space. When Tavener’s voices overlap in canonic delay, multiple light trajectories interweave-some reversing, some accelerating-so that luminous threads appear to pass through one another without collision. Moments of silence are honoured by complete blackout, allowing retinal after-images to linger like the memory of prayer. This ebb and flow produces an experiential hinge between sight and inner vision; the audience oscillates between watching light happen and feeling it echo inside the body.

Technically, the piece avoids digital effects that would impose external symbolism. All refractions and flares originate from in-camera optics: rotating Fresnel lenses, diffused sheets and choreographed dimmer curves. Post-production serves only to composite layers, align them with musical phrasing, and preserve the delicate gradations that occur at the threshold of visible range. The fidelity to real-world physics keeps the imagery grounded, ensuring that its ethereality arises from matter, not metaphor.

Seeing the Invisible therefore proposes light as a medium of phenomenological inquiry. By synchronising luminous events with Tavener’s somber polyphony, it gives form to the ungraspable-a visual murmuring that parallels the canticle’s invocation of presence beyond words. In the interval between flare and fade, the work gestures toward an invisible interiority we sense more than see, inviting contemplation not of doctrine but of the sheer fact that perception can reach for what it cannot hold.