Automated Lighting, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3

Stage-Lighting Systems Overview

The future of art is light.—Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor (1869–1954)

There used to be a hard line drawn between automated and conventional lighting. Today that line is being blurred. It used to be that automated lighting was a luminaire with automated pan and tilt under computer control and conventional lighting was not. And then along came color-changing LED lights. Like their panning and tilting cousins, these lights are under computer (or console) control, and some color-changing LED fixtures even have automated tilt, further blurring the lines between automated, color-changing, and conventional lighting.

But, historically, the biggest distinction between automated lighting and conventional ...