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Iluminated Artwork Draws Nighttime Visitors to Downtown Blackpool

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Blackpool's city council was looking to encourage people to linger in the downtown area and take advantage of the area's many restaurants, bars, cafes, clubs and performance venues. They commissioned £3.5 million for a public art projection, Brilliance, which consists of six aluminum-clad arches traversing Birley Street. To ensure that the sculpture would not just loom unlit and unnoticed in the dark, design firms BDP and World Wide Lighting Design worked with Blackpool's Illuminations department to arrange for moving lights to be installed in weatherproof domes along the surrounding streets. The resulting light show takes place every 10 minutes.

 

Greg McLenahan of World Wide Lighting Design and the Illuminations department chose Robe's ColorSpot 2500E ATs for the installation, which was overseen by principal building contractors, J. McCann & Co Ltd. The 36 fixtures were sourced from Robe UK.

 

McLenahan had used Robe gear for a number of other projects, including a giant mirror ball sculpture that was installed along Blackpool's sea-front Promenade in 2005, which had been one of the original inspirations for this larger project.

 

Each of the arch sculptures along Birley Street is lit with three ColorSpot 2500E ATs. The fixtures are uses for visual effects that include gobo patterns along the street, on the pavement and up the buildings, to highlight the glistening curvature of the other arches, and for skyward beam effects.

 

The undersides of the arches are also equipped with LED floods, 200 nodes of CK i-Color Flex and four Bose speakers.

 

In addition, all the streetlights have been replaced by 45 lengths of white LED strip made by DW Windsors, which built the arches. All the arches are linked with power and data running down the street via three cateneries.

 

Along Church, Corporation and Clifton Streets, another 18 Robe ColorSpot 2500E ATs cast their beams downward, onto buildings and into the air.

 

Church Street is pedestrianized, so the Robes are set on slow color, gobo and movement chases, with seasonal gobos such as snowflakes and sun graphics swapped in as needed. The fixtures in Corporation and Clifton Streets are used for higher-level beam work.

 

Lighting control for all four streets is from a central office halfway up Birley Street. The project makes use of three ShowCAD Artists systems – one dedicated to Birley Street, the second for the other three streets, and the third as a fully redundant backup.

 

The fixtures along Church, Corporation and Clifton Streets are all run via a W-DMX wireless system, and 16 lines of DMX are run through a PathPort DMX manager for Ethernet to DMX conversion. The sound track is stored on a KL3 music server, which also plays between-show music.

 

A Scada intelligent power management system is incorporated into the control set up which allows power to be cut to any fitting on the site, and also controls the conventional street light dimming via photo cell and dali conversion.

 

Brilliance received funding from the Northwest Development Agency, the European Regional Development Fund and Blackpool Council.