Lichtreise
Travel routes drawn by hand with a UV LED onto a single long-exposure photograph — a map exposed rather than rendered.
Lichtreise (“light journey”) is a map made without a single line of code: travel routes drawn as light, captured on a long-exposure photograph.
The technique, from a 2011 experiment, is as simple as it gets — a battery-powered UV LED, moved by hand along each route over the photographed surface while the shutter stays open. Every journey becomes one continuous arc of light; together they accumulate into an infographic that was never rendered, only exposed.
The result makes a quiet argument: visualization doesn’t have to be digital to be precise, and the most direct way to draw movement is sometimes to move.
