Vivid Sydney

Vivid Sydney is an annual music/art/technology extravaganza held over 18 days from the end of May through mid-June. Sydney has the greatest market share of creative industries in Australia and over the last ten years or so the city has positioned itself as a regional and global leader in the creative economy.[1]

Vivid Sydney is the city's attempt at showcasing its creative capital. There are really too many events to describe, many of which, frankly, sound pretty wearisome. Billed as 'a platform for the creative industries to collaborate, foster business connections and showcase new ideas,' in a lot of ways it's just an expo writ large. However, at night it transfigures and illuminates the city.

In the daylight I'd seen the unlit pink LED pillars that are sprinkled along the Sydney harbor docks, the purple flags displayed on every downtown street. As a visitor-traveler, everyone tells you that you have to see the lights at night. I had the feeling it would be part Stone Mountain Laser Show, part Ted Talk-combining the dullness of the former with the insufferable tech boosterism of the latter. Last night I cycled down to circular quay to finally see what all the fuss is about. 

I got downtown around 7pm, an hour after dusk. For the three weeks, each night a series of immersive illuminations are projected atop some of Sydney's most prominent buildings. A visual representation of the Aboriginal calendar, with it six seasons, is projected onto six of the city's skyscrapers. The Opera House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Custom House, which border the harbor and together form a kind of triangle around its perimeter, each commissioned an artist or group of artists to produce a light display. Along the docks for a stretch of some 3 miles there are a series of smaller exhibits and interactive light displays, creating a string of blinking, undulating, fluorescent light.

What made the experience so enjoyable was how communal the whole thing felt. Families, packs of teenagers, the lonely photographers with their tripods, weaving between each other, then stopping together when a building unexpectedly lights-up-fractals of color blooming and reconfiguring across the stately sandstone exteriors-then moving on. Everyone is bundled up; parents adjusting jackets and gloves (because Australians like Arkansans don't know what cold is). It reminded me of the Christmas markets in Hungary and Slovakia. Except with lasers. I took some pictures and video. 

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[1] The creative economy refers to work in the creative and cultural sectors: music and performing arts; film, television and radio; software development and multimedia; writing, publishing and print media; architecture, design and visual arts.  However, it should also encompass the various forms of service labor that feed into and enable work in these fields. For a really interesting research project/ blog exploring the creative industries between and within Sydney, Shanghai and Kolkata and the changing patterns of labor and mobility in the whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation, check out Transit Labour