As cities around the world vie for the title of most liveable and most sustainable, the City of Sydney Council continues to gain the attention of the world with cultural events, tourist destinations, and the planet’s best New Year Eve fireworks. The urban landscape of the city has for years also lent itself as the backdrop to luminous creative endeavours, turning the night-time skyline of the town into a feast of luminescence.

As part of the Vivid Sydney festival, Smart Light Sydney showcased a range of lighting techniques. These installations were required to include clever design, innovative technology, reusable materials, energy efficiency and reduced light wastage. One major installation, the Light Walk, featured 25 light art sculptures, including seven works produced by international artists from countries including the UK, Portugal, Germany and Switzerland. As visitors strolled around historic parts of the city, they encountered ‘sculptures’ as diverse as pedal-powered artwork on the banks of Circular Quay to a real-time weather pattern projection on Observatory Hill, from a display of moving people creating a human flag in The Rocks to a four-storey-high pot of fibre-optic flowers swaying in the breeze in Cadman Park.

EASILY LED

Festival director and founder Mary-Anne Kyriakou was extremely keen to ensure the artists and designers created a new work that considered an energy conscious approach to the design. “All designers were encouraged to be innovative with LED technology along with exploring the theme of City and Memories,” she said. “Light is all about atmosphere and this builds and creates our memories of people and spaces. One of the key selection criteria was the work needed to engage with the public.”

Smart Light Sydney operated on three core principles. The installations were required to support energy reduction, encourage best practice in lighting design and reduce obtrusive light into the night sky. As for the curatorial aspects of the works; the designs were expected to embrace an architectural lighting approach, incorporating a sense of the theatrical by way of a marriage between music and light. “I consider all of these areas to be part of public light art,” Kyriakou said.

The technical aspects of the works were project managed by Andy Webster, with consultancy by Andre Kecskes and Mark Hammer of Creative Lighting & Audio.

With such a diversity of art to be deployed, the various installations took anywhere from a few hours to a few days to rig. One installation, Jewel Box of Light by Reinhard Germer, Fiona Venn and Tim Geary, saw the Garrison Church in Argyle Street lit from within, creating a glowing jewel box of light showing the diversity of colours within the intricate stained glass windows. Through the use of low energy LED and metal halide lighting, Jewel Box of Light used less than half the energy usually required to light the church.

For the team, this installation was the most challenging. “The coordination of the installation both inside and outside the Garrison Church meant we were dealing with scaffolding, riggers, electricians, wet weather and keeping the church open for its normal day-to-day activities,” Kecskes said. “The fixtures inside the church were rigged 10 metres in the air with the setup taking place over the pews and furniture of the heritage-listed church. Outside we had wet weather issues and road closures to deal with,” he added.