The Canon project

investigates lighting design as a new area in the documentation of technical theatre. Lighting design is hard to capture, to document. The result only exists during the performance. It is related to stage design, staging and the vision of the director. All physical artefacts are by definition only indirect evidence of its existence. We start from following questions:

• What are the possible ways of documenting design and designers?
• How can we represent the designs and their results in a online data-driven platform?
• How can designers prepare the safeguarding of their heritage?
• How can we support collection owners who have limited expertise in the field to document what they have?

Canon experiments with:

• digitalization and safeguarding of design heritage
• safeguarding formats that are hard to read without specific software or hardware like 3D drawings, control system data files and virtual lighting visualisations.
• documenting the art form (the production)
• documenting the technical background (Light plots, lists etc.) of a production.
• describing the methodology, the process, independent of a production.
• describing the art works of the designer, based on the oeuvre.

Canon:

• documents 4 designers of diverse types to serve as case studies and made available in a sustainable open digital format.
• builds expertise about the different approaches and documenting strategies, including  selection criteria, and different ways to deal with file formats and information.
• develops an ontology leading to an improved and accepted data structure.
• creates guidelines on how to document lighting design.