Guerrilla Lighting

Disguised under another name but building on the guerrillalighting.net principles, on the evening of Wednesday 9th March fifty brave and cheery citizens of all ages threw their energies into lighting up two significant and historic buildings in the South Side of Edinburgh.

While the event, a PopUP Lighting flashmob, had been advertised, the actual buildings to be lit were a closely guarded secret until the night.

They lit up spectacularly Buccleuch and Greyfriars Free Church on West Crosscauseway and The Chapel of Ease, an Edinburgh University building on Chapel Street. A group worked from the traffic island, lightpainting to create images recalling the Trust’s hopes to make The Causey a place for people where community  events happen.

The torchbearers were local Southsiders, Napier and Edinburgh University students and Causey supporters, led by Natalie Bell of KSLD and her colleagues. The event was organised by The Causey Development Trust.

See the images from the event here

Notes:

1. The Causey Development Trust , formerly the West Crosscauseway Association, has been working since 2007 with local people to transform The Causey, the triangular space at Buccleuch Street and West Crosscauseway, from a traffic island into a place for people where community events happen. With Ideas Workshops and a Public Consultation The Causey Development Trust has arrived at outline designs for how The Causey could be designed for people to use. The PopUp event is one example of this.
2. The design of the PopUp Lighting event is created by professional lighting designers    and Napier University, offering their professional services freely.
3. The event is supported by KSLD, Arcade Architects, Mike Stoane Lighting, Philips Dynalite, XAL Architectural Lighting, BDP Architects, 56 North and Tesco Metro.

It’s taken a while for us to get this on the site properly but it still doesn’t diminish the amazing results.

A staggering 1500 – 3000 people turned out to the guerrilla lighting event organised in Salo, Finland by Finnish lighting designers Jari Vuorinen and Timo Aalto as part of the European Capital of Culture Turku 2011 official programme.

The event played out on a snowy Sunday with 40 enthusiastic guerrillas bringing light to the Finnish winter night. The torches were once again supplied by the Finnish City of Light – Jyväskylä.

Four sites were lit:

1.    An old grain silo close to the railway station

2.    A ghetto romantic overpass

3.    An old wooden building

4.    The local culture centre, KIVA (eng. ”nice”)”

See the official photographs (copyright Salonjokilaakso / Tero Mäkinen) in the gallery here

Report from Guerilla Lighting event – Friday March 18th, 19:00 Inverleith Park

Campaigners gathered in Edinburghʼs Inverleith Park this weekend for a “Guerilla Lighting” event to highlight their campaign to stop part of the park being sold for housing.

The Friends of Inverleith Park are protesting against the City of Edinburgh Councilʼs plans to sell off a corner of the park for a luxury housing development.

Locals say that the site has long been a part of the public park and are campaigning to save the space for community use. The lighting event brought together members of the local community, explored alternative uses for the site and highlighted what the community value about their park.

The Council describes the site, near the children’s play park, as a “surplus property asset” and intend to file a planning application for 7 luxury private homes on this site.

“Once this land is sold it is lost to the people of Edinburgh forever” said Tony Cook, Convener of the Friends of Inverleith Park.

“The council has sneaked through a change in planning designation for this site without the community – or even our local councillors- knowing about it, so that they can sell it off to the highest bidder. We realise the council is short of cash, but selling off one of the city’s finest views is short sighted to say the least. They should be the guardians of our land, not the real estate brokers. ”

Claire Hope, lighting designer for KSLD who organised the secret event explained the idea behind the Guerrilla Lighting: “The idea is to bring local people together through something creative. Guerrilla lighting is all about highlighting a specific cause but itʼs also about having fun. Weʼre hoping that some experimenting with light will spark some great ideas for how this space can be used by the community instead of being lost for housing.”

For more of the amazing images of this event click here.

For more information about the campaign, please contact:

Tony Cook (Convenor, Friends of Inverleith Park) on: 0131 332 4759 or tony.cook13npt@btinternet.com

Nigel Bagshaw (Chair, Stockbridge and Inverleith Community Council) on: 0131 332 6665 or nigel.bagshaw@btopenworld.com

Notes:

1) Inverleith Park was bought by the city father’s from the Rocheid Estate in 1889, and is a premier city park, part of the Inverleith Conservation area. The site in question is currently used as a Park’s depot, but was originally used as a plant nursery area.

2) Guerilla lighting is traditionally used to protest against wasteful use of light and have fun raising awareness of the power of light. KSLD have decided to use its powerful imagery to help the Save The Inverleith Park campaign, and help the campaigners to explore some of their ideas for the for how this spaced could be used by the community

3) KSLD is an independent lighting design consultancy with clients across the globe. Established in 1989 it has a long record of successful projects including Arts Centres, Museums and Galleries, Hotels and Restaurants, Commercial and Historic Buildings. KSLDʼs lighting designers are selected from Arts, Architecture and Theatre backgrounds and deal with light as a design medium, unique in its lack of substance but vital in creating the visual impact.

4) Contact Claire Hope for further information – claire@ksld.com

A staggering 1500 – 3000 people turned out to the guerrilla lighting event organised in Salo, Finland by Finnish light warriors Jari Vuorinen and Timo Aalto as part of the European Capital of Culture Turku 2011 official programme.

Check here from some local press and we’ll post the full images as soon as they arrive.

http://www.salo.fi/linkit/salotietoa/vuodenvarrellatapahtunutta/2011/kuttuuripaakaupukitapahtumanavajaisetsalossa/default.aspx

http://www.salo.fi/13271.aspx

Jari, Antti – we are loving your work!

Como Organizar Guerrilla Lighting.  ¡Ahora en español!

Thanks to our Spanish collaborator  - Aitor Aloa del Teso in Bilbao – we now have the Guerrilla lighting manifesto and “how to” guide in Spanish.   Click on the link to download it.

How to_spanish

Watch out for more from Aitor in the coming months – including a session on Guerrilla Lighting at the Pecha Kucha Night in Bilbao on 27th January!

Taking the idea of Guerrilla Lighting to new depths!

Pete Lummis and his brother Simon have been sinking to new depths to capture some amazing images. Simon uses a Kowlowski torch with a halogen lamp. It has a nice tight narrow primary beam and a soft wide secondary distribution. Pete captured these images at around the 40m deep mark, so a lot of light and colour had been filtered out but they still look very impressive. The site in this case was in Orkney – Scapa Flow – and the targets were WW1 German ships and submarines.

Click on the images to get higher res versions.

Following last years successful event in Sandvik the Norwegian Guerrilla Lighting troops return with follow-up event. This years action took place in Dremen, about 30 minutes outside of Oslo.

There were 3 sites and 3 Lighting Designers: Marlin Martinsen (marlinmartinsen@hotmail.com), Line Jensen (linel_jenssen@hotmail.com) and Mari Sandbo (mari@dfd.no).

The action was coordinated and led by Guerrilla general: Linda Knoph Vigsnæs (vigsnaes@online.no).

Check in the gallery for more images and on this link for some cool Norwegian TV coverage.

Check out the latest cool image produced to promote the Guerrilla Lighting workshop in Singapore…

Make sure you follow the Guerrilla Lighting Singapore web site for updates as the workshop progresses from Wednesday onwards…

http://www.guerrillalighting.sg/

Kekezzini hit Kouvola – City of Concrete

Hoy Mates!!

Lights on!

Good old Finnish Guerrilla support team Juho & Antti (also known as the kekezzini brothers) hit the streets of Kouvola Finland on the 30th of September. On this cold but yet so beautiful night the Guerrilla action was realized by the students from a local school of arts. Together with the great help of a local camera club and the city of Kouvola we pulled out a night never to forget!

This time the guerrilla action was a true audiovisual experience as the local musician, or should we say ‘soundscapearchitect’ Esa Kotilainen joined the team with some incredible live synthesizer music. Esa’s portable soundsystem was built on an old milkcart and the soundscapes he improvised on site. Respect!

Kouvola city is known from the extensive use of concrete in architecture so during daytime the city appears quite.. hmm… can we say… grey!?! But hey, this is just what every guerrilla is looking for, right!? And so were the hundreds of people who came to see what’s going on…

Check out how the concrete took new form as the darkness arrived…

for more information contact hiltuning@gmail.com

More pictures to follow – and they will be worth the wait!

In the 3-day inaugural Guerrilla Lighting Student Workshop, students are inducted into the mysterious world of light, and will interact as a team to propose for designs for selected sites, whilst being inspired by lighting designers. Using simple, frills-free tools with tonnes of creativity, students will witness the transformation of seemingly mundane forgotten urban pockets into a mystical wonderland.

http://www.guerrillalighting.sg/