Like the color organ inventors, Hungarian kinetic artist Schöffer loved coming up with neologisms to describe his art and theory. For instance, he said that much of his work concerned “chronodynamism,” or the “structuring of time.” Schoeffer also referred to his work as “lumiodynamism,” or the play of light on a surface and in space. His goal was to illuminate, re-form, and reshape space via the movement and play of a kinetic work of art. His Lux series of kinetic sculptures, with their steel towers and discs with various-sized holes cut into their surfaces, closely resembles Moholy’s Light Space Modulator. Like Moholy’s creation, these Lux devices sit between a light source and a surface or screen, and they shape projections by the movement of their elements and size of their openings. The Lux projections produce blizzards of color that effectively reconfigure the space of their use. Schöffer believed that his chromodynamic art “no longer aspires to become integrated in the limited circuit of museums, collections, dealer, antiquarians, but becomes an object of daily use with the real of all, an article of mass consumption, in this case a spectacle, to satisfy everyone’s needs for aesthetic enjoyment having a high sensorial condensation.”
Schöffer’s art spins around these axes of material and immaterial, solid object and ephemeral experience. Writing on the synthesis of art and electronics, Schoeffer said of his Teleluminoscope, a device that distorted and reshaped television signals (realized in advance of Paik-Abe video synthesizer), “The electronic tool is born. After the etcher’s needle, the chisel, the modeling of heavy materials, we now have electricity and electronics, the modeling of weightless and immaterial substances, such as space, light, and time.”