Sparkly Things: Lighting Design and the Contemporary Spectacle

Public light festivals are increasingly a feature of modern cities hoping to increase activity and amenity and to brighten long winter nights. There are a variety of agendas behind these festivals which intersect the technical, cultural and social currents of globalism and capitalism. The commodification of experiences of awe and the privatisation of public space feature heavily in these efforts to increase engagement, leading to an instrumental use of lighting design as a driver of commercial activity.In this article I trace some of the common threads of the relationship between lighting design and consumer culture, focusing on the role of lighting festivals in Australia and questioning how they engage with narratives investigating contemporary capitalism. The nature and use of the spectacle, as described by the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord of the Situationist International, will be considered as a framework to investigate these phenomena, with reference to a number of writers who have engaged with cultural events, the sublime and the spectacle.