Dazzling interactive light festival turns the focus onto its home city
Spectra
Various venues, Aberdeen JJJJ
From modest beginnings, Aberdeen’s Spectra festival – dubbed Scotland’s Festival of Light – is now ten years old and draws thousands of visitors. This year, however, there is a greater sense that elements of Spectra have been crafted to respond to Aberdeen.
The festival has commissioned artist duo Heinrich & Palmer to make Winds of Change, an impressive, atmospheric film installation shown in the sculpture court of Aberdeen Art Gallery, which explores the city’s industrial transitions from fishing to oil and to renewables. It also raises the tricky subject of energy, which is more directly addressed on Broad Street where Paths for All invite visitors to help power the artwork by cycling.
Works such as the projection by Double Take on the façade of His
Majesty’s Theatre, and Flora Litchfield’s Lightstream in Marischal College Quad, draw on local stories, and St Nicholas Kirk is illuminated by local light and sound designers LEM. Look Again, based at Gray’s School of Art, has commissioned ten artists with Aberdeen connections to make augmented reality work for a new programme strand, Northern Lights.
In many of the other pieces, interaction is key: visitors can wander among freehanging chains of lights in Squidsoup’s Submergence, or among mirrored “sonic monoliths” in Continuum’s
Illumaphonium. Affinity, by Amigo & Amigo, lights up in response to touch, apparently mimicking patterns of connectivity in the human brain.
Perhaps all light is, to some extent, interactive. Anne Bennet’s Butterfly Dream, in the Art Gallery’s Remembrance Hall, is delicate and poignant, and Studio Vertigo’s projects were delightful: Spin Me A Yarn, a giant ball of wool, and Our Beating Heart, a mirrorball heart which throbs as it casts clouds of dappled light. Until tomorrow