Reconfiguring Familiar Worlds with Light Projection: The Gertrude Street Projection Festival, 2017

Abstract

Festivalization, including light festivals, has been conceived as a neoliberal process that strategically serves the interests of commerce, compounding inequity and producing artistically compromised, homogeneous, and passively consumed spectacles. In this article, though, using the case of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival in Melbourne, Australia, we argue that light projection art can create new ways of perceiving our familiar urban environments that can prompt us to reimagine our surroundings, their histories, and affective experiences. We investigate how the creative use of projected light onto buildings, objects, and walls can offer potent effects: Such installations can deepen a sense of place by drawing attention to usually overlooked aspects of the built environment; reenchant space by defamiliarizing habitually apprehended surroundings; bring other places and histories into local realms; and generate interactivity. We also exemplify how novel sensory and affective transformations can be produced by light in urban settings.