Music Festivals can provide artists, designers, and architects a platform to present their work to large crowds. The sheer scale of these installations, the space for artistic exploration, and the vast audience they reach can give designers the opportunity of a lifetime to showcase their ideas. Through scale, color, imagery, and lighting, these installations create lasting impressions on the people who attend these events and those who see them through news coverage or social media. Some themes explored this year included reframing familiar things in unfamiliar ways, large-scale abstract geometries at the intersection of technology and art, and the use of innovative new materials.
Displaying Familiar Objects in an Unfamiliar Way:
Maggie West / Eden
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Burning Man through the Years: 7 of the Best Installations Displayed at Nevada's Annual Music and Arts FestivalIn this Coachella installation, photographer and artist Maggie West recontextualized plants through their massive scale and odd lighting. Each side of the 56-foot-tall installation showed photographs taken under surreal cool or warm lighting. At night, the installation lit up, projecting visual effects based on the natural features of each plant.
Estudio Normal / Capot
Architecture office Estudio Normal repurposed ninety-five car hoods to design the sculptural epicenter for the Buenos Aires Lollapalooza. They arranged them in a cone-like shape to create shading for the public. The installation was born while observing the alternate role that parked cars' hoods play in the city, such as seating for socializing.
Kumkum Fernando / The Messengers
Artist Kukum Fernando fused east asian symbology with futuristic geometries to create totem-like figures for Coachella. Inspired by his upbringing in Sri Lanka, he gave a futuristic spin to the myths and imagery he grew up with to give unique characteristics to each sculpture, producing brightly colored and intricately detailed robot-like creatures
At the Intersection of Art and Technology:
Vincent Leroy / Molecular Cloud
Vincent Leroy's kinetic and reflective installation aimed to alter the visitors' perception of space at Coachella. The artist's cloud-like installations comprised a series of moving pink spheres reflecting the crowds and their surroundings.
Ozel Office / Holoflux
UCLA Architecture faculty Guvenc Ozel's studio created an abstract sculptural piece that displayed digital art. The interdisciplinary firm designed a piece meant to reframe the visitor's perception of the digital and physical. It lit up at night, projecting different bright colors and shapes and creating vastly different ways of understanding the geometry from afar and closeup.
Exploring New Materials:
MIT Media Lab / The Living Knitwork
MIT's living pavilion at Burning Man used 3D-knitted and electric active yarns to illuminate its flower-like geometry. Its yarns contained sensors that responded to user interaction by providing illumination and shifting colors. The technology used for the project's materiality seamlessly merged technology, architecture, and artistic expression to create an experience that took users into an interactive storytelling journey.
Simon Carroll / Hayes Pavilion
Festival set designer Simon Carroll designed a pavilion made from salvaged timber and mycelium at the Glastonbury festival. The 26-meter-long spiraling frame held a wall clad in biomaterial grown from fungi. This installation brought attention to alternative biomaterials that could be used to create the elaborate sets necessary for music festivals.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Year in Review, presented by Randers Tegl.
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