625 - 750 nm | a dialogue about red light
- Keivan Esmaeili
- Sep 11
- 2 min read
A DIALOGUE ABOUT RED LIGHT
friday 4:18pm
Narrator Why choose red light? Or better yet—why red instead of any other color in a project?
o1 Elodie.
Narrator I mean—use verbs. Tell me what red light does that other colors don’t.
o1 It energizes.
o2 It wipes out other colors. Under red light, people look almost black and white.
o3 Milan.
o1 Sometimes it feels devilish.
Narrator (to an ox just entering) What does red light mean to you?
o4 That thing. A bit mischievous.
Narrator And you—what’s your take?
o2 Who are you asking—the AI?
Narrator No. You.
o5 You mean adjectives? Mine are… chaos.
Narrator That’s not an adjective.
o5 Fine—my “non-adjectives” are chaos and… I don’t know. Honestly, I
don’t want to appear among the operators. I ask to be removed.
Narrator You walk into a club flooded with red light—how do you feel?
o1 Like I said—energized.
Narrator Not me. Red drags me down, puts me in a calm, almost heavy mood.
o2 Same here. Red relaxes me, makes me feel at ease.
o1 But red signals danger—emotionally speaking.
Narrator Exactly. At first, in a red-lit club, I feel lowered, pressed down—calm, almost soothed. But after four hours, I start to feel something else creeping in.
o5 Not me. In a red-lit club I feel free.
Narrator Free? You’re telling me that if you spend four hours inside that place in Milan—you still feel free?
o5 Yes. Free.
Narrator Feelings are contradictory. It’s like the body relaxes, but the mind eventually senses unease—because culturally I link red to danger, traffic lights, blood.
o1 If we’re talking emotions, that’s one thing. But think of ship emergency lights—why red?
Because it cuts through darkness better than other colors.
Narrator Right.
o3 But wait—isn’t red actually less visible from a distance?
Narrator and o1 (together) Of course not!
o1 Think of lighthouses at sea.
Narrator Or the red beacons on skyscrapers. How do you explain those?
o3 But those are different reds.
