Astera Titan Tubes and PixelBricks are woven into the lighting design of Björk’s Cornucopia Tour by Bruno Poet and Ricard White.
The show concept was initiated by the artist herself and developed with creative collaborators, James Merry and Argentinian Film Director, Lucrecia Martel. The video content was produced by Tobias Gremmler with the set designed by Chiara Stevenson.
With a host of strong visual identities from the stage design, the theatrical performance of the musicians and the video content, White felt that lighting “needed to complement, embellish and tie-in with all these elements and become the link between the physical and digital worlds,” in the process making performers appear in that same physical space in front of everyone’s eyes.
The ‘utopian planet’ stage set features performance risers that appear as floating platforms, nicknamed ‘the mushrooms’ by the crew. In keeping with the illusion of floating, Poet and White turned to Titan Tubes.
The riser undersides are constructed from a set of flocked, latex fungal gills with 24 Titan Tubes positioned around the base of these ‘gills’. When operated in ‘pixel’ mode, waves of colour bring the stage to life. The stage and video design features three sets of automated tracked projection surfaces that interact with the risers to constantly shift and change the architecture of the space throughout the show.
Often, performers are positioned in between layers of projection fabric, so Poet and White required a lighting fixture that could be used at ‘close quarters’ and inaccessible via a moving light overhead.
PixelBricks proved a great solution and were “perfect” for this task, according to White, citing their discreet size, weight and wireless nature of Astera technologies. “Having sets of small, reliable and camera-friendly fixtures to hand with the ability to quickly deploy is a game-changer,” White concluded.
