Festival Page 1

The World Premiere of "Northern Lights" is the public show piece for this years Adelaide Festival of Arts

And it is amazing!

Celebrating one of the most beautiful cultural boulevards in the world for the duration of the Festival, the city’s historic architectural icons will be painted with light and coloured with life.

The State Library of South Australia, The South Australian Museum, The Art Gallery of South Australia on North Terrace are the sandstone cornerstones of our culture, illuminating and enlightening each generation. For two weeks, they themselves will take the spotlight every night of the Festival from dusk till 2am, the artists from the internationally acclaimed The Electric Canvas will transform their facades.

Through a constantly changing array of perfect, jaw-dropping architectural projection, reflecting the heritage and function of these beautiful buildings, Colonel Light’s 19thcentury vision will become a 21st-century vision in light.

How's it done?

Since its establishment a decade ago, The Electric Canvas has created stadium spectacles for sporting events such as the recent East Asian Games in Macau and the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

It has also done a lot of corporate work for fashion houses, transforming the Memorial Hall in Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek Square into a colossal Louis Vuitton handbag, and incorporating Cartier logos and designs into the facade of that company's new store in Shanghai.

Northern Lights uses giant French-made PIGI system projectors, each weighing more than 200kg. The projectors are incredibly bright, running at 90,000 lumens - compared with fewer than 2000 lumens for an average home data projector.

They zone in on particular elements of the architecture, recolour them, put other graphic treatments on them, so they really fit the building perfectly. Each building will has multiple colour and graphic treatments.

To create the projections, The Electric Canvas first had to devise a way of mapping the buildings.

They developed a camera that uses a projection lenses to, in a sense, photograph the buildings. This inverted image is digitally photographed the image exactly as it is seen through the lens of the projector.

This process of "surveying" locks in, almost to the millimetre, where the projector has to be positioned. They then make a template, so whatever we design will hit the building brick-for-brick.

Northern Lights is the first time The Electric Canvas has had the opportunity to work with so many culturally based buildings.

And it's FREE!

The show begins.....

Bonython Hall

Bonython Hall again

Images change every 5 mins.....

The Mitchell Building

The Mortlock Library

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