Aurora weighing bids for light features for festival

‘Exciting project’: Event scheduled to launch in October

“Geographically, there really isn’t anything like this in the Chicago area. It’s a pretty exciting project.” — Jen Byrne, Aurora’s Public Arts director

The Aurora City Council Finance Committee on Thursday recommended contracts with two companies to provide light features for a new city festival next year.

The new fall festival of light will take place for four weeks between Oct. 4 and Nov. 1. Both are first Fridays of the month, meaning the festival will tie in with the monthly First Fridays celebrations sponsored by the Aurora Downtown group for both months.

But the festival itself will run for an entire month, city officials said.

“The ultimate goal is to create another successful festival downtown,” said Alex Alexandrou, the city’s chief management officer. “We’re going to do a lot of marketing for this. We expect this to be another in a long line of successful events downtown.”

Jen Byrne, the city’s Public Arts director, said the festival was conceived featuring lights as a nod to Aurora being one of the first cities in the country to light its streets with electricity, leading to the city’s nickname City of Lights.

Earlier this year, the City Council approved accepting a $192,779 grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which the city would match with its own funds from the Public Art budget.

Byrne has said the light festival is modeled after such festivals in places like Cincinnati; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Baltimore. Byrne said the closest place in the Midwest is Cincinnati.

“Geographically, there really isn’t anything like this in the Chicago area,” she said. “It’s a pretty exciting project.”

The proposed contracts would be with two companies, Creos Experts-Conseils Inc., of Quebec, Canada, and Wireframe Studio Inc., based in Montreal, Canada, to provide three light features. Byrne said these are the first of the contracts, there will be more to come.

The event will include light displays, digital markers and roving entertainers.

Creos would provide a 400-foot-long Sonic Runway along the length of the Water Street Mall.

Byrne said the light-art installation converts audio signals into patterns of light that shoot down the corridor of 23 LED-lined arches at the speed of sound. At the front of the runway, the observers see musical sound waves rippling away from them. Walking down the corridor, sound and light are always in sync. Looking back from the far end, walkers can see the sound waves coming at them, and hear the music as the pattern reaches them.

Wireframe would provide three inflated spheres called Xposure on which people could “paint” with light, as well as a feature called Shadowing, which is four streetlight-like things that record someone’s shadow, then plays it back.

The time of year for the festival was chosen to try to balance when there is enough darkness for the light features, but there is less risk of the weather being too cold, rainy or snowy.

Byrne said that while the clocks have not changed back from Daylight Savings Time by then, it still gets dark shortly after 6 p.m. She said by at least 7 p.m., it will be plenty dark.

“It does not have to be completely dark to enjoy these,” she said.

Byrne said she saw the Sonic Runway in San Jose, California, in October, and officials there like it so much, they are making it a permanent feature in their city.