Singapore's iLight Marina Bay event, christened Asia's first and only sustainable light art festival, hit its stride with a colorful sophomore showing in 2012. iLight Marina Bay 2012 featured over 30 installations that were equal parts eye-catching and eco-friendly, and that drew in over 565,000 visitors — a 30% increase from the inaugural showcase in 2010. The event's broad appeal allowed the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which presented the event, to further its goal of creating energy-saving lighting awareness in urban areas. "With sustainability being one of the festival's core values, we want everyone to start thinking about the environment and how to create sustainable livable cities," Mary-Anne Kyriakou, the event's director, said.
Themed "Light Meets Asia," the program highlighted LED lighting's sustainability, and several designers turned to Color Kinetics solutions to illustrate the technology's viability. Two standout installations were Edwin Tan's enLIGHTenment and Ryf Zaini's 5QU1D, which both used Color Kinetics technology to create highly interactive, unique displays.
Tan's enLIGHTenment, a multicolored video wall comprised entirely of ColorGraze Powercore luminaires (now specified with
ColorGraze IntelliHue Powercore), flashed "yes" or "no" in response to onlookers' queries. After posing a question to the wall — á la a Magic 8 Ball — viewers triggered an answer by pushing a button on the accompanying console. To power this interactive display, Tan connected the console to a Philips Dynalite DDNG232 integration device, which was then linked to a Color Kinetics iPlayer 3 controller.
Zaini intended 5QU1D, a squid-like creation embedded with blinking, multicolored lights, to embody modernity's rapid-fire changes and their impact on nature. He used iColor Flex LMX (now specified with Flex Compact gen3, RGB) direct-view strand lights to animate the colorful emblem, which was partially sprawled across steps leading to the bay as if it had just emerged from the water. To initiate special light sequences and effects across the squid, Zaini also used an iPlayer 3 controller paired with a third-party ultrasonic motion sensor.
Program coordinators hoped that such striking displays would "bring people to Marina Bay to experience innovation, sustainability, and exciting light art installations," Kyriakou said, and the dynamic — and "green" — usage of Color Kinetics solutions ensured that this vision came to fruition.
