Tonight we walked through Durham's Botanic Gardens, which were lit in a magical and other-worldly way as part of the city's Lumiere festival. I only hope the rain (torrential towards the end of this evening) doesn't discourage people from attending before the event ends on Sunday.
It was not only about the use of light but also fascinating sounds created by long tubes (ghostly harmonies), old gramophones, temple singing bowls, and (apparently, according to the brochure), bat echolocation noises. I just loved walking through backlit bamboo. There was lots of organic-influenced stuff - evolving projections showing plants putting down roots, then growing, then changing into the shapes of single leaves. Better still, a psychedelic kaleidoscope that was created by projecting the split image from a camera of a bowl of snails slithering over leaves. There were fires that put me in mind of primal solstice ceremonies, but which dd's friend reckoned were like "Lost in Space" or "Planet of the Apes". And a stunning display of electronic flowers, pinwheel-dervishes, and a gramophone made of light, all reflected in the pond. And there was ghostly gauze to run through, lit by shafts of light and rendered spooky with dry ice (even eerier once you viewed it through the raindrops): dd and friends kept running through it and shrieking as the dry ice came out of the pipe. Oh, and there was an area by the benches that was lit by a string of ordinary standard lamps - a twisted version of an old fashioned sitting room.
I wish that I had photographs worth sharing. I took a few as souvenirs, but only those with heavy-duty digital SLRs would have succeeded in getting anything that really captured these beautiful images. Even then, without the sounds and the chill in the air and the scent of the damp vegetation, it wouldn't really come close.
