Vivid Sydney is a 23-day festival of light, music and ideas that takes place in Australia’s largest city. Now in its eighth year, Vivid began as Smart Light Sydney festival with a focus on energy efficiency by lighting designer Mary-Anne Kyriakou and headlined by musical artist Brian Eno. It is now called the world’s largest outdoor “art gallery,” with the 2016 event drawing more than two million visitors outdoors to downtown Sydney during May and June, the coolest (and darkest) time of the year in Australia.
PLSN spoke with lighting designer Richard Neville, director and co-founder of Mandylights, about the annual winter event, focusing on their popular design, Cathedral of Light, and other popular installations at the festival.
PLSN: How did Mandylights get involved with the Vivid Sydney Project?
Richard Neville: We have been involved with Vivid Sydney in previous years, but only in a very limited capacity; mostly because we do a large proportion of our work overseas. This year we decided to go all out in response to Vivid’s requests for us to do more.
What brief or theme did Mandylights get as to direction on design from the producers?
Vivid is fantastic in the way that their curation is very trusting and supporting of designers. Each of our four projects had a very different design approach that Vivid allowed to evolve in different ways to suit the individual project. For Totem Forest, we worked very closely with the state-run Transport for New South Wales (NSW) to create the design. The Cathedral of Light was completely our own design using an existing installation.
Will-o-the-Wisps benefitted from our discussions with the festival’s creative director, Ignatius Jones, and exploring Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Last, but certainly not least, our lighting of Taronga Zoo’s Be The Light For The Wild project was an amazing collaboration with our friends at Ample Projects. The Zoo’s internal staff, from animal handlers to marketing management, also provided tremendous input.
What challenges were met, overcome, and how so?
Vivid has an incredibly demanding production environment. All installations have to weather almost any conditions. We deal with temperatures ranging from 30 degrees Celsius down to freezing. In the second week of the festival, our harbor-side installations were hit by 120km/h winds, waves and salt water for three days, exceeding any engineering expectations.
To manage the festival, we effectively have our whole company on standby each night to respond to any damage or outages. We make it a priority to ensure everything works, regardless of the weather conditions.
Please provide some information regarding design and implementation.
The Cathedral of Light, a surprisingly simple artwork, is a series of steel cathedral-window shaped archways that stretch 60 meters long and are filled with about a thousand individually hung strands of custom-made bud light, producing a beautiful warm white glow. The idea is that, from a distance, the artwork appears to be one bright single light, but upon closer inspection, thousands of tiny individual sources appear, not unlike a church and its congregation. One of my core design ethos is that light artworks do not have to be all about interactivity. Designing installations that are born of a simple, single idea such as this can create something that is just beautiful, and static.
With Will-o-the-Wisps, Adrienn Lord and I sought to create an organic installation that seemed to feed off the energy of the huge sprawling Moreton Bay Fig Tree on the site. We came up with a somewhat mysterious illuminated form, which is a mix of a flower, firefly, stalk, and ball. We had fewer than two thousand made, each fitted with an individually controllable RGB LED pixel in the base, using a PRG Mbox Studio server to push custom video content across the whole installation. We programmed the evolving content to create the illusion of movement under the tree canopy, as if each individual wisp affected those around it.
The Totem Forest stands in a NSW Transport construction zone right in the middle of Sydney’s central business district. Our brief was to create an interactive, attention-grabbing artwork that would be able to deal with high pedestrian traffic and work effectively under the very bright existing white streetlights.
The 18 totems stand in clusters of four, each surrounding three large 44-gallon drums fitted with electronic drum pads. Visitors were able to “drum” on the various pads to affect different interactive changes to the totems, such as color effects, pattern, and movement speeds.
Inside each totem are 144 individually controllable custom-made LED pixels, mapped via a grandMA console. Clear domes mounted on each totem contain three Robe 100 LED moving lights, which we used to extend the color of the installation onto the surrounding buildings.
What was the inspiration behind the name Mandylights?
Well, five lighting designers walk into a bar in Sydney…honest! The name was borne from the initials of each of those people.
Your website mentions “from humble beginnings.” What were you doing that led up to the creation of the company?
Some friendly music teachers actually introduced my business partner, Daniel Mercer, and I to each other while in high school. We worked on countless amateur productions together our early years. After a few years freelancing on various projects, we ended up at that table talking about starting a lighting company.
The concept of “only opting to own highly specialized and customized equipment,” while visionary, seems a risky business plan. Please give a bit of background on how you and your partner came to that decision.
Mandylights, in hindsight, was, and still is, a risky business plan. Ten years ago, the idea of a commercial design collective was still relatively new in the Asia Pacific region. We hit a lot of initial opposition from other freelancers and from larger production companies. Above everything else, we wanted Mandylights to have a strong creative focus.
Over the years, we have designed and built hundreds of our own fixtures, rigging systems, power and data distribution, etc., which in many ways is just an extension of our design background. We figured; why not create purpose-built infrastructure and fixtures to produce our unique lighting designs in the best possible way?
For more information on Mandylights and Vivid Sydney, please visit www.mandylights.com and www.vividsydney.com .
