Vivid Sydney 09

Vivid Sydney –a four-prong festival of arts, music, light and ideas aimed at capturing Sydney’s creative energy and transforming our city into a living canvas.

Luminous

The art of noise has always reigned supreme in Sydney. Now it leaps into a new era with Luminous, an amazing music and performance festival with a twist.

Curated by legendary musical trailblazer and seminal music producer Brian Eno, Luminous will feature 30 music acts, a fistful of performance pieces and a dazzling array of light installations, including Eno's own work ‘77 Million Paintings’, and Lighting of the Sails, visual art installation that will light up the Sydney Opera House.

Eno is a revered and famously eccentric sonic prophet who says he can’t wait to be “let loose on Sydney”. Famous as a founding member of Roxy Music, the ambient messiah behind several seminal solo albums and a collaborator with U2, David Bowie and Coldplay, the man christened Brian Peter George St John Le Baptiste De La Salle Eno describes his Luminous line-up of artists as “people who work in the new territories, the places in between, the places out at the edges”.

Musical luminaries confirmed for Luminous include New York supergroup Battles, UK synth popsters Ladytron, electronic whiz Jon Hopkins, Sydney Festival favourite Reggie Watts and Fourth World composer Jon Hassell.

These artists, reckons Eno, either “take old forms and infuse them with new life” or “have invented forms of art that didn’t previously exist”.

But Luminous is much more than music. As evidenced by the line-up (highlights at right), it’s a festival that will nourish the eyes, ears... and the imagination.

Creative

Unique to Vivid Sydney is the public symposia of Creative Sydney. Creative Sydney will bring together the city’s cutting-edge filmmakers, designers, bloggers, photographers, academics and entrepreneurs and ask them to plot a bold future for Sydney’s creative industries.

These free events, to be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, will offer right-brain-style panel discussions on abstract, left-brain topics with the hopes of uniting Sydney’s creative community and providing advice, ideas and inspiration to attendees.

“Sydney isn’t a bubble and we can’t blame the tyranny of distance for not setting new benchmarks in global creativity,” says festival co-curator Marcus Westbury.

“It’s Sydneysiders who’ll dictate the creative pulse of a city in the coming years and Creative Sydney is the hub for them to cross-connect.” Westbury, who helmed Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival (now the city’s premier tourism event and one of the largest media arts events in the world) and Melbourne's Next Wave Festival, says Sydney is a natural melting pot for a peculiarly convict creativity.

“Sydney does big events like the Olympics well, but we need to work harder on small-scale projects. Too often we gather together creative minds by virtue of their having interesting jobs and ask them to pull in one direction. But Creative Sydney will be a catalyst for 100 of the most outward-looking personalities in town – rebels, renegades, shit-stirrers, cage rattlers and troublemakers – to not only recognise their differences but find new ways to unite.”

Creative Sydney happens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with events twice daily from Wed 27 May up until Fri 12 Jun.

Smart Light Sydney

Sydney ignites as a supernatural city of light when the switch is flicked on Smart Light Sydney, a sensory smorgasbord of music, light, performance and debate.

The beacon at the centre of it all is the Light Walk, a world-first, totally free, 90-minute journey through 26 interactive light sculptures spanning The Rocks, around Circular Quay all the way to Bennelong Point and a reborn Sydney Opera House.

Smart Light Sydney also incorporates symposia, exhibitions, and Licht, a unique orchestral epic. According to artistic director Mary-Anne Kyriakou, the festival has been designed to revitalise dormant urban spaces and engage Sydneysiders in a debate on the energy that fuels a city, creative and otherwise.

“Sydney is blessed with amazing natural light by day – bright blue skies, shimmering waters, sun-dappled bushlands. But our nights need light to drive economy but also to weave magic and enchantment,” Kyriakou says.

The theme for this nightscape is ‘City and Memories’. “Cities are full of light pollution – uncontrolled light, flood lighting, light spilling into the atmosphere,” Kyriakou points out.

“With Smart Light we want to harness that light and redefine it, creating new memories for people in re-energised spaces in old Sydney town.”

By day, Sydneysiders can attend talk-fests on lighting design and architectural illumination. From dusk, they’ll stroll the harbour foreshore to see iconic buildings and underrated nooks turned into living canvases.

Firewater

Built around a spectacular pyrotechnic recreation of the 1814 sinking of convict ship The Three Bees, this three-day festival of music, food and fire will see Sydneysiders invited to float lanterns onto the waters of Sydney harbour in tribute to our convict descendants.

Fire Water runs 12–14 Jun, 6–9pm. Time Out Syndey special festival features can be found here .

For full Vivid Syndey festival programme details, see here .