Big City Lights

The Gold Coast’s central business district is about to receive a technological facelift courtesy of a new festival of light, design, installation and performance. Big City Lights* is the latest creation by Placemakers, the same people responsible for Bleach* Festival. 

Essentially the buildings in the Southport CBD will become a giant digital canvas with large scale projections, laneway activations and amazing installations reinterpret the city landscape. Artistic Director Rosie Dennis says that when she moved back to the Gold Coast she began to think about how the city had changed and wanted to create a festival to reflect that.

“When I came back three years ago you see the city with fresh eyes. The city sees itself in an entrepreneurial and when you consider the creative potential. I was thinking I wanted to create something that had a direct relationship with place and how the Gold Coast is developing and changing. Big City Lights* lets us do all of those kinds of things by having a conversation with architecture and design in a playful way.”

One of the artists involved in the Festival is Peter Thiedeke from Griffith University’s School of Design. Born and raised on the Gold Coast, Peter headed for Europe at a time when there was very little opportunity for local artists, and now after building a roster of clients from London to Paris and New York to Buenos Aires Peter has moved back to a very different Gold Coast from the one he left behind. 

“With Big City Lights* I’m personally involved as a researcher and an artist creating an original work and a lot of the buildings in the CBD will be covered in beautiful art. We need to establish more events like this to get more students excited by new ideas and the artistic possibilities on the Gold Coast. By creating these types of opportunities it draws more artists and more students to the city as well.”

Peter Thiedeke

Lilium

Peter’s work for the Festival is Lilium, a deep exploration of nature re-imagined in the guise urban regeneration, created by an intense observation of the life cycle of lilies.

“I literally set up a studio laboratory for six weeks watching them bloom and die and decay, photographing the process. By condensing that into a six minute moving image you see what they do and it really is astounding. You can see which ones are male, which ones are female, how they interact, how they attract each other, how they procreate – all kinds of stuff in explicit detail.”

Peter collaborated with audio artists Andrew Brown and John Ferguson to create sound that’s generated by the image itself. By utilising special audio systems Lilium will be enhanced by a unique soundscape depending on where you’re standing and experiencing it.

“Lilium will be 30m wide. It’s going to be divided into different panels, so you can’t see the entirety from any one perspective at any one time and the work will change as you move through it. The idea is to think more about urban space and how we live and experience cities. City life is a very random, haphazard, ad hoc experience where we bump into things and every time it’s a bit different, depending on the social engagement – where we stand at a particular time of day. You could spend five days with Lilium and still not see and hear the whole thing as one single unified piece of art.”

City showpiece

Big City Lights* will not only be a showpiece for our established artists, it’s also an opportunity for the city’s emerging artists, including school students from five Gold Coast high schools who worked with an artist collective called Mint Art House to design a 16 metre long UV piece of work in an alleyway where roving lights will all move to reveal the artwork.

Peter Thiedeke and Rosie Dennis

Rosie Dennis says festivals like Big City Lights* are so important for the local community, not only to give people greater access to new concepts and ideas, but to allow emerging local artists to have their work curated alongside others with national and international reputations.

“We’ve got a lot of amazing talent here on the Gold Coast and Big City Lights* provides another platform for local artists to showcase their work. More than that, it’s a chance for the public to support them by immersing themselves in a new experience for the Gold Coast. It’s a privilege that we get to play in the CBD with the buildings as our canvas, it’s really quite extraordinary. Some of these pieces are provocative, but a lot of them are just pure fun – it doesn’t matter whether you’re 3 or 83, and best of all, it’s free.”

Big City Lights* runs from  7 - 10 July. Full program here.