An image from the Stellar lights festival, being held at Smales Farm.
An image from the Stellar lights festival, being held at Smales Farm.
When Angus Muir talks about light bulbs, he makes them sound like living, breathing things.
"We call them 'pixels' or 'nodes' and they are intelligent," says Muir, a Kiwi design and installation artist known for creating huge outdoor art installations made from hundreds of light bulbs.
"When you control a sequence of them, you can tell them to turn on at different times - and that's where the magic comes."
There'll be plenty of magic on display when Muir flicks the "on" button at the debut of the Stellar light festival at Smales Farm on Thursday night.
Muir, a frequent exhibitor at the now-defunct Art in the Dark festival, has spent much of this week setting up seven of his own works as part of Stellar, being held to co-incide with Matariki celebrations.
An image from the Stellar lights festival, being held at Smales Farm.
Entry is free to see the seven exhibits - some of which were co-designed by Alexandra Heaney - across a 1km area, with food and coffee available. If it's raining, the exhibits can be viewed from your car on a drive-through route.
An incredible amount of technology is needed to make Stellar's exhibits work properly, says Muir, who has exhibited three times at Sydney's Vivid festival.
"It's a big festival - it's going to have presence. Some of these installations have 6000-8000 points of colour. It's not like (we're setting up) fairy lights or rope lights, there's a lot of work that's gone on behind the scenes that people may not know about."
One exhibit, called Array, is fresh from Vivid and hasn't yet been seen in New Zealand. It consists of five stainless steel posts that look unassuming but Muir says they work like giant TV screens.
"It doesn't really look like much but inside each post are 2000 little individual pixels that we control.
"You wouldn't think of it as a TV but it's basically a really low resolution television ... We're just working on a different scale."
An image from the Stellar lights festival, being held at Smales Farm.
Other installations include Digital Wattle, a tree-shaped exhibit with dangling orbs that has travelled to China, Singapore and Sydney; Shroud, which lets viewers relax in bean bags under a canopy of roped lights, and Field, which blends into its grassy surroundings.
Muir advises families to set aside an hour to soak up all the installations. And don't worry about the weather, a problem which hampered Art in the Dark's success. Muir says these exhibits are designed to withstand extreme weather conditions, and Stellar will be going ahead rain, shine - or snowstorm.
"We've been in Amsterdam doing a work on a canal - you can imagine the level of waterproofing you need there. We had a snow storm in Queenstown. Temperature is a problem too. In Singapore you can't work on your sculpture because it gets too hot."
Though it's only on this weekend, Muir hopes Stellar could be the start of a yearly lighting festival for Auckland, similar to Vivid. "There are a lot of people trying ... it's such an opportunity," he says.
What: Debut of light festival Stellar: Bright Ideas Where: Smales Farm, Auckland's North Shore When: 6-11pm, July 9-12
