Karl
Jónsson
Turning wavelengths into art, across the visible spectrum and beyond.
Scroll for sunrise
Work
Installations · concepts · spaces
Celestial Echo
A second sun. After dusk, Celestial Echo carries on the sun's daily path, replaying sunrise and sunset indoors and stretching daylight through the short days of a northern winter.
The light follows the Planckian locus, the curve a heated body traces as it glows from deep red to white. It is as exact as it is atmospheric: every fixture moves from 1000 K to 3200 K the way the sky does at dawn, and back again at dusk.
The work takes several forms. In the Pentaclipse, five eclipse-shaped fixtures with four white channels each run a one-hour fade, so the sunrise climbs the wall from the lowest disc to the highest.
The sunrise climbs the wall
The one-hour program, as it runs on the installation. Each disc starts at 1000 K and warms toward 3200 K as the next one above it begins.
No commercial LED reaches 1000 K, so the work needed its own chip: the Twilight LED, developed by Visiolite. It combines three custom phosphor channels at 1800, 2500 and 3200 K with a native emitter near 700 nm for the deepest red, with color rendering of 90 CRI across the warm channels, and is paired with state-of-the-art addressable LED ICs for precise control of every point of light.
The installation runs on its own: Casambi PWM4 drivers on a Bluetooth mesh, with no gateway, account or internet connection. The drivers keep their own time and know their location, so sunrise and sunset follow the real sun outside.
A walk-through sunrise
Light frames along a passage rise from first red light to full day, timed to the real sun at the site. In review with art festivals.
A sun that rises through space
An open frame hung with a dense field of vertical light rods. Each rod lights along its length, so together they draw a sun in three dimensions that rises, glows and sets, visible from every side of the square.
Sunrise 15%
Standard LEDs mix red, green and blue. Chromaclipse mixes nine channels to reach the most vibrant colors the human eye can see.
Vibrance and ChromaX LEDs add saturated wavelengths between the primaries, where colors like lavender, rose and chartreuse live. The inside face and the outer halo are mixed independently, so each program pairs two colors that rarely meet in artificial light.
One fixture, many skies
Endless combinations of deep, vibrant color: 2×9 channels of sharp, high-contrast wavelengths and rich phosphors, inside and out.
Program 01 / 21
Celestial Mento
Moves with momentum. A wooden disc on the wall that you turn by hand, and the light behind it answers like the sun.
Developed with artist and furniture designer Emilía Borgþórsdóttir and Visiolite co-founder Arman Bastani.
The further it turns, the higher the sun rises: from a red crescent at the bottom edge to a full warm halo. Light becomes part of the furniture, and the interaction becomes part of the light.
Turn to raise the sun
Visualization of the working concept
Light at home
Lighting designed together with the architecture, in collaboration with Minarc Architects.
Low-voltage DC throughout: efficient, quiet and ready for renewable power, with the light built into walls, stairs and ceilings rather than added afterwards.
Project ALPICE · Hollywood Hills
LIT Lighting Design Awards 2026 · Winner
A 4,000 sq ft home by Minarc with a centralized LVDC lighting system feeding every interior and exterior light. Twilight LEDs make the lava rocks along the staircase glow like molten stone, and give Erla's obsidian lava wall a slow ember glow.
PlúsHús
Minarc · off-grid ready DC homeOff-grid ready and powered purely by DC, with no inverters or LED drivers. The result: 30% more energy, 50% less material, five times the lifetime, and healthier living with no melatonin-suppressing blue light, flicker or high-frequency noise.
Visual artist and lighting inventor
Karl Jónsson is an Icelandic-American visual artist and inventor who works with light as both medium and technology. His life and work have moved between Reykjavík, Copenhagen and Southern California.
His career in light spans festivals, touring with bands, theater, TV productions, residential, commercial and entertainment lighting. More recently it has turned to art and architecture, through his own concepts and collaborations with architects and other artists.
Alongside the work runs a life of invention. His first was a reverse-DLP spectrum analyzer for colored light, built at the Engineering University of Copenhagen. He founded Visiolite in Copenhagen in 1999, invented the world's first smart light bulb in 2010, pioneered Tridonic's Net4More solution in 2016, and in 2019 invented X-PoE®, an award-winning power architecture for intelligent lighting and buildings.
Today that knowledge goes into the art itself: Twilight, Vibrance and ChromaX LEDs and controls developed for his installations, reaching color temperatures and hues that standard LEDs cannot.
A.Sc. Electrical Science · B.Sc. Electronics Engineering · M.Sc. Information Technology and Computer Science. Member of IALD, IES, AES and IEEE.
- Minarc ArchitectsProject ALPICE and PlúsHús.
- Arman BastaniVisiolite co-founder. Celestial Echo Matrix, Chromaclipse Matrix and Celestial Mento.
- Christian VandendorpeVisiolite co-founder and creator of Huebic, a one-stop knowledge base for color theory.
- Emilía BorgþórsdóttirArtist and furniture designer. Celestial Mento.
LIT Lighting Design Awards 2026, Winner — Project ALPICE, with Visiolite. Presented in Paris, June 2026.
Light in furniture
Light as an integrated part of the design, not a fixture added to it. Physical elements, momentum and gravity become the controls: objects you turn, tilt or set in motion, and the light responds. A new era of living objects.
Light for wellbeing
Beyond the circadian rhythm: light tuned wavelength by wavelength to lift mood, ease eye strain, support healing and circulation, and even help the skin synthesize vitamin D.
Public art
Concepts in review with festivals and exhibitions, with more 3D work to come.