We’ve created a special interactive lighting exhibit designed to highlight our common love for trees.  Built around a natural willow frame, the Heartwood heart uses addressable LED technology and a mobile app which allows people to control the colours and patterns of the beating heart, and set the speed to match their own…

In support of the #LightItInRed campaign highlighting the plight of the events industry during Covid-19 lockdown, we returned to the historic Robinson’s Shaft at Heartlands, Pool, and installed one of our ‘Heartwood’ LED hearts, beating red in the Cornish mizzle!

Heartwood is an LED neon heart with a frame made from local willow and using our own addressable LED control technology, which can be made responsive to people approaching it.  Our main aim for this is to highlight beautiful and significant trees in both urban and woodland environments, but it turns out it works well on heritage structures too!

The song on the video is by a Cornish singer (and member of Fisherman’s Friends) Toby Lobb, aka Loveridge, with his kind permission.

We were commissioned by the Day-Light Group to create an interactive artwork for the DiaspAURA light festival in St. Day Old Church.  The Church has been derelict for many years and is now being brought back into use as a community arts space.  The bells were lost – along with the roof! – many years ago, so we took it on ourselves to reinstate them…

We studied the mechanisms and technique of bell ringing and simulated the physics in our ViGraph software, which generated laser graphic bell images on the old bell tower, together with two different pitches of bell sounds.  Visitors used real bell ropes connected to industrial force sensors to ring the bells – and they had to get the timing right!

Each night of the festival we also produced a spectacular ‘liquid sky’, graphic and beam show, mapped to the key parts of the Church’s architecture.

We created an amazing interactive light trail for a Celebration of Light and Clay through the 26 acres of historic Wheal Martyn Museum in the ‘clay country’  near St. Austell. We aimed to create a fun, interactive experience for the whole family, to encourage people who may not have visited the museum before to come and explore.

The trail included:

• Custom LED installations on the ERF truck and Flat Rod Tunnel
• Mirrored lighting on the working waterwheel
• A Winter-themed laser show, highlighting many of the museums exhibits and using local poetry and band music, projected onto the side of the neighbouring Imerys clay pit, 500m away
• A UV woodland experience, with ‘magic’ drawing, musical instruments, a glowing lounge and many photo opportunities
• A totally disorienting mirror-ball!
• LED-lit tree eyes, creatures and water lillies
• Atmospheric tree uplighting throughout

As well as lighting the Wheal Martyn ERF truck as described below, we also created an amazing flowing LED experience in the “Flat Rod Tunnel”, which links the main site to the woodland and working China Clay pit view where we did our laser show.  This is a Scheduled Ancient Monument so we had to be really sensitive and not use any type of intrusive fixing.  We went for a tension rig with wooden frames at each end, and PVC pipes as the arch segments.  The custom patterns created with our ViGraph software led the visitors on through the tunnel and into the magical woodland.

As part of our series of light installations for the festive Light and Clay three-day event at Wheal Martyn Museum, we created a custom programmed LED light display which we sympatheticly installed on the museum’s ERF truck. It was important to consider how to attach the LEDs to avoid any damage to the exhibit, yet secure enough to be driven in the St Austell Torchlit Carnival and waterproof to withstand the Cornish weather.

After winning first prize in the carnival’s decorated vintage vehicle class the truck was displayed during the Light and Clay event for visitors to see the programmed display from all angles.

Drawing inspiration from maritime history and traditional seafaring practices to combine with innovative engineering, lighting technology and specialist software design we devised the Laser Halyard to offer audiences a unique interactive experience.

During the opening ceremony to launch the Mayflower 400 celebrations 32 children hoisted the Laser Halyard which mapped signal flags spelling out M400 onto the adjacent Old Bakery Chimney at the historic Royal William Dockyard in Plymouth.

The following 4 days of the Illuminate festival saw thousands of people visit the site and haul the Laser Halyard, across all ages and physical abilities, either as individuals or in groups. Through interacting with the Halyard visitors discovered more about their local maritime history and engaged with the life of a sailor firsthand.

Inspired by the combination of the Apollo landing 50th anniversary, the distinctive projection surface and the music of Public Sector Broadcasting, we created two special performances of abstract images and hand drawn graphics that we projected throughout the evening. These were laser mapped onto the satellite dish Arthur (GHY1) from a technically challenging angle backstage and adjusted to give a perfect view for the audience.

As STEAM artists we have a keen interest in communicating the science behind our work. During the festival we delivered our Wavemakers workshop which explored the principles of wave physics through sound and laser light in an exciting hands-on session. Participants of all ages and abilities were invited to create live soundscapes together. The combination of keyboard, microphone and MIDI pads with drum beats and samples of the Apollo 50 transmissions enabled participants to experiment and observe the effects on frequency, amplitude and shape of the laser waveforms projected before them as they played.

The Poly in Falmouth was transformed into the first laser enhanced cinema in the UK!  We created a unique immersive laser experience for Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and won Third place at the 2019 ILDA Awards (International Laser Display Association) for Innovative and Fine Art Laser Applications.

Perfectly timed laser effects created an atmosphere which drew the audience further into the action. The flight of the UFOs circled overhead and they experienced a close encounter as the light surrounded them to abduct them from their seats and return them safely to earth.  The highlight was a recreation of the famous light keyboard sequence, played live along with the film.

This performance was devised to provide the perfect science fiction inspired finale for this technology networking event commissioned by Software Cornwall/ KernowDAT  and sponsored by Flowmoco. Held at the World Heritage Site, Heartlands in Pool we projected onto the side and chimney of the Historic Robinson’s Shaft Engine House.

Ten pieces of music and excerpts from sci-fi movie and TV favourites were edited together including The Matrix, Tron, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Blade Runner and Terminator.  Hand-drawn graphics and animations included some iconic characters such as R2D2, Deckard and Rachael, the Tron Bike, Daleks, K9 and Jodie Whittaker, the new Doctor!

Performed during Storm Bronaugh with driving rain and a Force 8 gale this certainly tested our claim to be “all weather”!  The slight wobble you may see is Lizzie, our Land Rover, being buffeted by the wind. Even in these conditions we started on time and our audience braved the weather and stayed to enjoy the performance to the very end!

Thanks to Stream Freedom for braving the elements, live-streaming the show and providing most of this footage.

As a fundraiser for the 50th Anniversary of the St. Agnes RNLI Lifeboat and using the sea as our theme we created a custom performance, set to 10 pieces of sea-themed music.  This contained bespoke graphics and tightly-synchronised beam sequences, which were projected both onto and over the 50m cliff-face for a family audience of over 400 people. The photo shows the view from where the video was taken.

It’sincredibly difficult to capture lasers on camera and so you won’t be seeing them at their brightest and most magical in a video. However, just imagine the amazement of the audience seeing them projected first-hand and over 20 metres high in such a fantastic location.

“Absolutely spectacular evening last night! Thanks so much”

“Breathtaking display. Rod Stewart’s Sailing went brilliantly with animated RNLI graphic. Loved the show”

“That was amazing, so different, atmospheric, great idea”

“Breathtaking exciting show down at Trevaunance Cove tonight”