Move over, holiday lights. Large-scale light installations that blend contemporary art and technology are taking off as a trend, lighting up the night from New Orleans and Baltimore to Sydney and London.
Many of these free light festivals include interactive displays that turn spectators into participants who can change colors or patterns by moving or playing a game. The events are also tourism magnets, attracting locals and out-of-towners alike to waterfronts, historic districts and other neighborhoods on dark winter nights and other periods when tourist activity may be low.
London counted more than a million visitors to its first light festival over four nights in January this year. The Lumiere London event included a larger-than-life projected elephant stomping through the air, a digital painting at Westminster Abbey and sculpted human forms flying above buildings.
New Orleans’ LUNA Fete attracted 30,000 visitors in 2015, its second year. The event included “The Pool” by artist Jen Lewin, in which a pool of swirling circles of light and color changed as spectators interact with it. “The Pool” will also be part of Baltimore’s first light festival, Light City Baltimore, taking place around the city’s Inner Harbor March 28-April 3.
Other exhibitions at Light City Baltimore will include digital portraits by an artist projecting lights, patterns and colors on festival-goers; “Lumin,” featuring lit-up sheets of acrylic that visitors can draw on to create a glowing, collaborative mural, and a flower sculpture called “Laser Lotus” that changes based on input from interactive touchpads.
Why the sudden boom in light festivals? For one thing, said Nick Stillman, acting director of Arts Council New Orleans, which organized LUNA Fete, “the technology is becoming more accessible and user-friendly and inexpensive.”
Contemporary artists are also increasingly using multimedia platforms and public spaces to bring art to wider audiences, collaborating with museums, governments and other entities “to produce things on a scale that is larger and more impactful” than what can be done in a studio, gallery or even a public plaza, Stillman said.
