If you need any indication of how far light festivals have come, just look to Prague’s Signal Festival. In 10 years, it has grown to become one of Europe’s ‘must sees’ and the biggest cultural event in Czechia. The appeal is universal: when Peter Parker and his friends plan a school trip to Europe in Spider-Man: Far From Home, where do they go? They go to Signal. Of course, they do.

In the early days, a light festival could claim to be a light festival with little more than a projection-mapped historic facade, a few glo-sticks, and a strong PR team. And that was fun and excitement enough to draw a crowd fascinated with tech and novelty. But light festivals have grown up, just as everyone involved in those early days hoped they would. It’s not just that the tech has improved dramatically — which it has — it’s the way the tech has been employed. All those who claimed light festivals and projection mapping were a new storytelling medium capable of tackling complex subjects have been vindicated, as have those who understood their nascent community-building power.

Signal 2023

Take Signal. In 2023, Japanese creative studio Flightgraf used two Griffyn Series pure laser projectors to map onto the iconic Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius and explore the fragile, interconnected existence of nature, the environment, and humanity. András L. Nagy used AI and Christie Griffyn^® 4K50-RGB and M 4K25 RGB pure laser projection to turn Prague’s Municipal Library into an exploration of visual qualities of symbols, text, and ASCII characters. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer captured the radiation of body temperature and then painted unique portraits using dispersed particles.

The results were as spectacular as the subjects were difficult. But that’s the point. As Signal’s Pavel Mrkus explains, when your community of visitors numbers hundreds of thousands, they are owed some form of ambitious, curated narrative, which only the festival can provide. “The different creative positions artworks take create a relationship between them and a new story or narrative. A third meaning can appear, maybe revealing unexpected things that surprise the audience. But as curators, we must have a light touch. A good curator does not simply create a story and then use the artists like figures in a chess game to populate it. Every year, when a new community of artists forms around a theme, we’re as surprised as anyone with the outcome.” Read more about Signal 2023 and the technology.

Signal 2024

This issue of AVenue goes to press around the same time Signal 2024 opens, so we don’t yet know precisely what will happen on the streets of Prague this October. But Pavel tells us that the 2024 theme of ecosystems is already proving to be fertile.

“Ecosystems is a nice umbrella for us; it can handle many, many different topics, and it’s not only about nature. If you go deeper, you can see ecosystems in almost everything: Life, city, and culture all have their own, and so this year’s theme is ‘Ecosystems 02 → Quest’. I understand artist Bill Fontana has been working on something around the fragility of cultures. That should be fascinating.”

The communities that make light festivals happen, the artists, the techs, the organizers, and the audiences, didn’t exist so long ago. They came together because light festivals brought them together.