Techno tree rocks dynamic venue
Famous for its unique circular structure, the Camden Roundhouse venue in Chalk Farm, London, England, hosts many forms of entertainment each year, including concerts, award shows, circuses, and plays. The stage, enclosed by 1,700 audience seats, can be transformed for different genres of performances and events. For the four-day Reverb Festival of Contemporary Classical Music, held at the Roundhouse, the centerpiece of the stage was a massive tree with branches that hung across the ceiling of the building.
Project designers Atmos, along with Grammy-award winning artist Imogen Heap, who also acted as the Reverb Festival curator, commissioned professional lighting solutions company Architainment to enhance the center-stage tree with distinctive lighting shows. Architainment chose Color Kinetics luminaires to create an interactive installation that would transform movement and sound into dazzling light effects. iColor Flex MX gen2 luminaires were wrapped around the massive tree trunk, then strung across the venue's ceiling, mimicking tree branches.
Light effects were generated by both performers and audience, creating a performing stage prop that produced completely new content in reaction to each new sound, and also served as an interactive public installation outside concert times.
iColor Flex MX gen2 was chosen because the flexible strands of high-intensity full-color LED nodes. This made it easy for the team to position each of the 4,800 nodes to produce extraordinary effects and expansive installations.
"Arboreal Lighting is about connecting people to music; about sensually transforming our environmental surroundings into a visual representation of the music that fills our ears, and courses through our veins," said Alex Haw of Atmos. "We have effectively created a massive piece of spatial video, a long portrait-format densely-pixelated trunk that bifurcates and unfolds into branches that weave throughout the magnificent structure of London's Camden Roundhouse."
