Out of Body Experience

Alaa Minawi【Netherlands, Palestine, Lebanon 】

Alaa Minawi’s installation features a group of people dancing. Celebrating the act of dance as an essential part of being human, the forms become disjointed, abstracted, their human forms slipping away around the edges as they enter an Out of Body Experience, a dreamlike state where a cathartic release is achieved.

Lacto-Reacto-Light

Jack Wimperis【UK】

LactoReactoLight is a large-scale interactive light sculpture by Jack Wimperis. The work consists of an array of recycled plastic milk bottles housed in metal mesh cages. A central
sensor detects audience movement, which is processed to animate the array in real time – transforming motion into glowing outlines, colourful patterns, and flame-like effects, as the audience collectively create a parallel landscape.

FloWeЯ PoWeЯ

Aerosculpture/ Jean-Pierre David and Christian Thellier【France】

FloWeЯ PoWeЯ exploits the optical illusion ‘persistence of vision’, a phenomenon where the human eye continues to briefly see an image after it has disappeared from view.
Here, light becomes matter, forming concentric flashes and infinite spirals, similar to multicoloured flowers. The invisible device only reveals the luminous traces of the LEDs, which eventually melt into the transparency of the night.
Presenting an almost hallucinatory experience, FloWeЯ PoWeЯ defends the values of love and peace through the surreal offering of digital flowers to its spectators.

In Bloom

Kumquat Lab【UK】

Inspired by flower pollination, In Bloom is a plant-shaped sculpture composed of ten
luminous spheres that act as interactive flowers. Touching a flower triggers a
musical note, echoing the dance of pollinators moving from bloom to bloom. The
work turns this natural ritual into a collective and intuitive act of music-making,
celebrating connection and the vital role of pollination.
The sculpture encourages a collaborative approach to music-making, offering visitors an opportunity to explore rhythm and melody together. Through its playful interactivity, In Bloom highlights the vital role of pollinators in our ecosystems. The experience invites a reflection on interconnectedness, highlighting the importance of nurturing biodiversity.

Trispheric Garden

REELIZE.STUDIO【Australia】

Trispheric Garden is an immersive installation of six illuminated pyramid obelisks encircling the Cabot Square fountain. Each obelisk houses mirror-like orbs that refract and reflect light, casting ethereal patterns across the water’s surface. Together, they transform the fountain into a ‘dreaming pond’, where reflections ripple like portals between reality and imagination.
Inspired by the architecture of dreams, the installation explores the tension between geometry and fluidity—solid forms that hold ephemeral light.
As perspectives shift, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve, Trispheric Garden invites stillness and introspection, offering a transcendent encounter with light, form, and the fluid nature of perception.

This installation was originally commissioned for Vivid Sydney 2025 with the support of Destination NSW.

For Ever and Ever and Ever

Anna Lomax【UK】

For ever and ever and ever is a triptych of light installations specifically commissioned for the 2026 festival. The works explore how repetition, reflection and colour can shift our sense of space and mood. Across the three sites, mirrors, neon and brushed metal are transformed into portals that fold light into themselves, creating infinite depth, glow and distortion.
Each location has its own rhythm.
At Cabot Place, Forever Loop is designed as a long vertical column combining traditional glass neon and angled mirrors all sat at the centre of the circular site. As people move around it, reflections stretch, bend and multiply, creating a looping illusion that constantly shifts with the viewer.
At Canada Place Forever Test brings a more playful and experimental feel. A series of smaller infinity lights made from recycled glass pieces from Anna’s traditional neon collection create focused lines of colour that reflect, distort and refract through curved mirrors.
Forever More at Jubilee Place is calm and reflective: a row of brushed aluminium monoliths containing infinity mirrors that glow with soft, shifting gradients. Some animate slowly, others stay still, creating a gentle balance of movement and quiet.
Together, the three works create a continuous journey through light, moving from quiet to playful to fully immersive. Blending industrial materials with softness and colour, the installations invite visitors to pause, look again and find a moment of joy and escape within the pace of the city.

Sol

Artistic Latvia/ Janis Petersons【Latvia】

What if the stars leaned closer?
What if the planets themselves could rest in your backyard, shimmering softly beneath your gaze? Artistic’s Sol imagines just that.
Space and the solar system fascinate us, and yet, most of us will never experience it up close. Here, within Crossrail Place Roof Garden, nestled among the flower beds and suspended just above the treetops, the solar system is bought into our world.
Earth drifts among Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune reminding us of our significance. Each planet offers us a gift: love, courage, wisdom, and light. Feel their harmony in your heart and soul as they guide you to love, creativity and compassion.

Aether

Architecture Social Club【UK】

Aether is a light field installation developed in collaboration with musician Max Cooper. It’s a charged space of potential energy—a woven grid of glowing lights that interpret sound into effervescent patterns and rhythmic movements. Aiming to conceive a narrative of music in a spatial form, Aether creates a visual embodiment of sound during a performance. Like a dancer improvising, Aether translates music into hypnotic waves and phosphorescent fragments, stirring something deeper within the audience. The installation was designed to not only deliver a sensory experience but also function as a tourable musical instrument in and of itself.

Blueprint

Studio Vertigo【UK】

Blueprint is a light and sound sculpture inspired by the DNA double helix, its two intertwined strands spiralling around a shared axis to echo the dual structure that holds the blueprint of life.
Genetic data from research into the TLR7 gene by Professor Christian Hedrich’s team is mapped onto the sculpture’s lighting, driving shifts in colour, rhythm and intensity. Composer Ed Carter sonifies the same dataset, making normally invisible biological structures both seen and heard.
Uniting art, science and motion in a single gesture, here, the double helix is reimagined as something both familiar and otherworldly, as if we are briefly seeing the hidden patterns of the body in an imagined landscape — like a half-remembered dream.
Canary Wharf is the perfect home for Blueprint, here there are more than 40 organisations working and investing in life sciences and healthcare innovation.
Joining a thriving ecosystem of start-ups and established companies, this installation connects the work in advanced therapies and genomic medicine happening in our cutting-edge lab spaces with the outdoor public spaces here on the Wharf. Uniting scientific discovery with human experience.

Hulahoop

Scale【France】

Hulahoop combines kineticism, light, and sound to produce a beautifully poetic installation. Through their sleek designs, Scale’s aim is to make us forget about the presence of technology, simply allowing the audience to bask in the light and movement as if naturally occurring. As the eye follows the lines traced by the installation, peripheral vision melts away, hypnotising the viewer into an almost dreamlike state.

Sanctuary

Ithaca Studio【UK】

Sanctuary is a tall, almost cathedral-like, open structure, designed to immerse the audience in atmospheric light and sound. Enter the Sanctuary and be surrounded by colourful, reflective, illuminations and cocooned in a soothing soundscape, as the lighting transforms from the soft glow of candlelight to the jewel-like, bright tones of stained glass. Sanctuary is designed to envelop the audience in a transformative, inspirational space, an escape from the everyday surroundings – a colourful and light-filled sanctuary from the hectic pace of life.

Un-Reel Access

KAPPA/ Patrick and Kaori Jones【UK/ Japan】

Un-Reel Access is a locked door standing before a wall. Radiant light shines from the door’s perimeter, beckoning curiosity about what lies beyond. Mysteriously, as if malleable, one corner of the door has been un-reeled, revealing a glow from within. As often in life, the light of our hopes and dreams remains locked behind closed doors. Through the power of light, Un-Reel Access asks us to abandon being bound by common sense. It is a portal that invites the curious mind to reframe and change its vision of the world. Faced with an unreachable future, Un-Reel Access points to an alternative route in which seemingly firm obstacles melt in the hands and visions of communities and individuals.

Colour Rush

Liz West【UK】

Colour Rush is a new light artwork and spatial drawing derived from a series of ink drawings that radiate kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant colours. A beacon of intricate colour relationships, the artwork aims to draw the visitor nearer for closer inspection and interaction.
This new piece uses multiple ink drawings as its starting point and colour way. Two different large ‘Concertina’ drawings were created before being cut up, mixed together, repositioned and folded into eight individual stripes. It is these luminous stripes that are the basis of this new octagonal light box.
Positioned on a raised and mirrored plinth, this 8-sided light box is reflected and multiplied to create a dynamic and ‘larger-than-life’ work. Like looking into a kaleidoscope, this playful work encourages visitors to look from all angles; mirroring and melding themselves, the world around them, and the artwork altogether. The meeting of colours acts as a physical and metaphorical meeting point for people, wherever the work is located.

Manifestation

Marcus Lyall【UK】

This audio-visual composition plays out across a 12m arc, wrapping the audience in an enchanting narrative. Inspired by Victorian Britain’s fascination with spiritualism, magic and the idea of summoning spirits, the laser generated animation morphs between abstract shapes and ghostly figures. Loosely based on ‘Thought Forms’ a 1905 book by spiritualist Anne Besant, who believed abstract visual forms could be linked to sounds or spiritual states, this piece delves back into the early dawn of ‘Visual Music’ shows, and their roots in seances and magic.

At the Hand

LACROIX【Canada】

At The Hand is an interactive volumetric light sculpture that turns human gesture into digital presence. A suspended constellation of light voxels forms a monumental hand that comes alive when the system recognises a visitor’s own hand through real-time computer vision. Taking control of the digital hand becomes a symbolic act — a quiet moment of introspection to reconsider how we share power, attention, and agency with technology.

Amplitudes

Limbic Cinema【UK】

Amplitudes is a large-scale water-screen projection exploring the diverse nature of waveforms that shape both the natural world and human experience. Animated waveforms are projected onto airborne water particles, creating a shimmering, holographic effect that shifts with the wind. Paired with music precisely synced to the visuals, the work generates a synaesthetic fusion of sound and image. The piece invites viewers into a contemplative space to reflect on the interplay between science and nature, offering a quiet, immersive moment to lose oneself within the rhythms that surround us.