Trip the Light Fantastic

UPDATE (Friday 1st November): Due to the weather forecast for this weekend,  the digital fireworks event - PixelPyros - has been postponed and will now take place on Monday 11th November at The Corn Exchange. 

This weekend is all about lights. On Friday night (1st Nov) the Royal Pavilion will become The Illuminated Palace when digital art duo, SDNA, will be using the palace as a canvas for their lighting and projections. The event will mark the launch of the new Turner in Brighton exhibition which opens on Saturday.

Then on Saturday night there will be a special digital fireworks display in Preston Park. I'll now pass you over to Seb Lee-Delisle, the digital artist behind PixelPryos to tell you a bit more about the event:

Everyone loves fireworks displays but usually you have to stand well back while the experts light the touch paper. Bored of just watching other people set off rockets, I created a digital fireworks display called PixelPyros, where the audience are in control!

We’re excited to be bringing it to Preston Park on the 2nd November as part of a national tour, which is also travelling to Nottingham, Leicester and Huddersfield. It’s completely free to attend, thanks to funding from Arts Council England.

Preston Park is such a classic location for outdoor events - we usually run PixelPyros in more urban environments so I’m really excited to see how well it plays out in a more traditional fireworks setting.

We’ve been working all year and we’ve finally put the finishing touches to the show. The fireworks are projected onto a 60-foot-wide screen using lasers and the brightest projectors we could get our hands on. We have lots of different themes and styles of fireworks, some that look like real fireworks and some that look more digital.

New for this year is the addition of lasers. The projectors are bright, but with the addition of powerful laser light we can actually compete with the brightness of real fireworks. We’ve been working hard to figure out how to control the lasers in real time with our software, and it’s finally paying off - the results are so spectacular. I can’t wait to see it full scale as part of the show.

Every single firework is launched by members of the audience - touch one of the orbs of light along the bottom of the screen, and a firework shoots out of it.

The show will be running at 7pm and 8pm on Saturday 2nd October so we’d love to see you there - the show literally won’t be the same without you!

Follow us on twitter @PixelPyros and like us on Facebook for the latest news and updates. In the event of bad weather check pixelpyros.org for updates.

Thanks Seb. So head to Brighton this weekend and get ready to trip the light fantastic....

Charlotte