On the making of the "Lights OROT" publication, 1988

The Lights OROT catalog is memorable, of course, because of the hole drilled through it designed to literally let in light, the subject of the exhibition. Bill Seaman and I, the editors, were used to working together as we collaborated on each others’ video art pieces, and we co-taught a class at the Media Lab Film section. Otto kept recent graduates at CAVS as Fellows by partially funding them to work on documentation. For example, I helped collect materials for the CAVS book back then, and noticed that some of those original slide notebooks and manila folders were still in the CAVS Special Archives at ACT in 2016, prior to digitization. Lights OROT was a physically beautiful catalog with a muted blue cover that evoked a twilight sky that set off the small circle of light. Was it a moon or a sun? I remember typing it out, but I can’t remember whether there was a word processing or layout program. We got Macintosh SE computers when they came out, so we must have used them. The alternative would have been to work in Emacs in one of MIT’s mainframe computing rooms. Bill may know. We divided the catalog into two halves and each took a section. I was surprised when I read his section because I had only focused on mine.