For the second year running, Sydney is celebrating the approach of winter with Vivid Sydney, a festival of light, music, and ideas. Brian Eno organized last year’s Vivid Live program and this year husband and wife team Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed have taken the curatorial helm. Anderson’s performance Music for Dogs and Reed’s noise band Metal Machine Trio are among the highlights, but the project that has wowed the crowd is Anderson’s lighting of the sails of the Sydney Opera House.
Anderson’s graphics, adaptations of previous artwork and motifs, playfully mix abstract, organic, and representational imagery. There are recognizable patches of hair, flowers, animal skin, fireworks, and paper doll clothes. Viewed together, the visuals create a kind of musical montage — without the sound. As Anderson told the Sydney Morning Herald, she aimed to make the projections look “slithery – kind of half alive” and the sails “ripple.”
Laurie Anderson’s Lighting the Sails remains on view at the Sydney Opera House through June 20, while Vivid Live events end June 11. View a selection of images from the light show below.
Laurie Anderson, Light the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostrea
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Laurie Anderson, Lighting the Sails, Sydney Opera House, May 27-June 20, 2010, Courtesy tco1961 Flickr Photostream
Comments (9)
love this – I work with light and this is an awesome use of it! Interesting how it relates to her dark-room-in-a-museum video exhibits and other work of hers I’ve seen before – here its burst out of the box in a big way. What a dramatic canvas to work with!!! I’m going to look up what Eno did with these last year…
Amazing Laurie! As always. Beautiful, original and totally appropriate. This is one of those projects that one asks oneself – why didn’t someone think of it before? I also feel that way to the new Creative Time project, Key to the City.
Part of what makes the light display so appealing is the architectural form. It is like seeing this very interesting shape that everyone has seen a hundred times as if it were new. Also, the light images and the architecture are symbiotic, as compared to the enjoyable but less symbiotic light shows on cathedrals (such as in Rouen).
Wow! I wish I could see this live as the patterns move and blend from one to the next!
[...] . [...]
Beautiful lighting effects!!!!! Check out also 3D Rendering
[...] + info Flavorwire [...]
[...] wife musicians Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed have lit up the Sydney Opera House with a montage of artwork and images. Gorgeous [...]
[...] treatments of the Sydney Opera House online a couple of weeks ago for an event called “VividSydney“, I expected that her imagery and textures would achieve similar transformations. The [...]
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