Festival
Now in its fifth year, Illuminate Adelaide’s idiosyncratic programming has built the festival into a feast of immersive audiovisual art and music. By Kosa Monteith.
Illuminate Adelaide: A high voltage winter festival
Yellow Swans are transcendental. Their wall-of-sound roar fills every edge of Lion Arts Factory on the first night of Unsound, Illuminate Adelaide’s festival-within-a-festival of genre-blurring music and audiovisual performance. You don’t need to know the history and improvisational methods of this experimental Oregon duo to be drawn into their hypnosis. The waves of distortion and pulsing layers of noise project an almost religious drone – lo and behold! Bathed in red light, it’s like hearing blood from the inside out. The vibrations are so immanent I could open my mouth and swallow them whole.
In its fifth year, Illuminate Adelaide is growing. Unsound has new digs in the Lion Arts Factory and Hindley Street Music Hall. The City Lights free installations stretch further along the northern edge of the CBD, Adelaide Central Market and Rundle Street. Art bleeds out, and more senses – notably those of taste, such as in an LED-screen-surrounded degustation Winter Forest – are engaged, with new events outside the CBD as well as the Supersonic multi-venue mega party.
As Hobart, Melbourne and Adelaide all host festivals to invigorate winter, they each require a distinct purpose and unique character. Illuminate is primarily a festival of light and technology. Artworks incorporate LED, laser, fibre optic and digital projection media, and music skews towards the electronic or hybrid, with audiovisual pieces and clubs and DJ programming.
Immersive experiences transform the mundane or transport you with multisensory effects. A centrepiece of altered states and other worlds is the Adelaide Botanic Garden takeover, but it would be an oversight to limit “immersive” to that: our physical and psychological experience changes with auditory hallucinations and visual trickery throughout the festival.
Art is not always accessible: it’s prone to barriers of lexicon or knowledge, or contained to designated “art spaces”. Illuminate reaches out and draws in. It’s also where words may fail to capture what must be seen, heard, touched and tasted to be believed.
Night Visions, the 2025 Botanic Garden installation, is an exploration of six other-worlds created by four artists. The journey begins with Craig Wash’s Monuments, 3D projections that transform tree foliage into the watchful faces of First Nations leaders becoming one with the natural world. Music composed by Elisha Umuhuri inspires awe with ghostly ambience. The monumental sculptures have the softness of flesh as they blink and smile, fragmenting as you change vantage points. In Jayden Sutherland’s piece, Urban Echoes, flashing columns of light and lasers create glowing vistas between city-like towers, from cold hues to flickering red. It’s the first piece in the series that features composer Jethro Woodward’s overarching score. The echoes drift and draw you to the next surprise, Chris Petridis’s Fracture, where light breaks and reflects between towering trees, revealing a twisting tunnel of snowy illumination as sonorous ice cracks and ponderous music convey enormity and fragility.
Inside the Bicentennial Conservatory is Robin Fox’s Canopy. In this self-contained installation, exploratory threads of light linked to Fox’s musical composition reach across the rainforest. Probing beams shoot through leaves and the boardwalk as the forest sings and plays. Petridis’s First Light attempts to re-create the primal feelings of seeing a sunrise for the first time. Through trees and mist, predawn glimmers grow to bursting sunlight with a chanting choir, breaking in a triumphant finale of bloody red and a flourish of strings. You pass through the prismatic joy of a rainbow in Amelia Kosminsky’s calming Phantasma to return to the real world. The intoxicating whole of Night Visions is more than the sum of its parts.
Many artworks are language-agnostic, with City Lights installations drawn from around the world. You could ignore most of the info plaques on the North Terrace promenade and still feel the fizz of enchantment. The unfolding geometric illusions of A path of light and time (Javier Riera, Spain) can only be comprehended if you pause to observe the slow hypnosis of moving parts. The Legend of the Golden Koi (Jake Yang, Australia) is based on a story, but the frozen shapes of climbing koi are no less beautiful for being unexplained. Emergence (This is Loop, UK) invites you into a panopticon of mirrors and apertures, reflection and refraction, accompanied by haunting NYX electronic drone choir’s vocals to produce quasi-religious awe.
Civic buildings are given playful facades, such as I give you a mountain (Joan Ross, Scotland/Australia), a projection on the Art Gallery of South Australia, an animated collage where surreal landscapes are juxtaposed by sudden adverts for “dog happiness” pills. There are fantastical environments such as moonGARDEN (Lucion, Canada), which projects undersea vistas on bubble spheres, Mycelium Network (Custom Fibre Optics, Britain) that reveals hidden fungal worlds in tracks of light, and a lawn of flashing pink sprouts that whispers cricket-click birdsongs in Spring Vibes (Studio Toer, The Netherlands).
Many pieces allow us to be integral to the artwork. The suspended rods of light in SomniUs (illumaphonium, UK) in Bonython Hall are only activated when we dance, making the sky dance back. VOICES (Pulsing Heart, Australia) is a circle of 50 tubes that must be spun to release the vocals of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Other works demand group participation or competition, as roving performers dressed as angels or rampant horses of light approach the wandering crowds and throngs of children.
While Unsound draws diehard fans of experimental, electronic, noise and dance music, its inherent experiential nature and tendency towards the audiovisual means we don’t need a perfect familiarity with genre. Just turn up and see what happens.
The idiosyncratic programming has dizzying variety, shunting from the hallucinatory, culturally fluid euphoric psych ripples of Los Thuthanaka (Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton), to British performer aya (with the aptly named hexed! album) casting a dark magic synthesis of bone-shaking beats, post-hardcore howls, hypnotic flashes and provocative charisma. German electronic pioneer Wolfgang Voigt gives us an LSD forest trip, a techno march through a towering projection of trees that slip into sombre, abstract shapes. Auditory loops evolve into anxiety-inducing disintegration and a swell of dissonance before releasing.
Shoegaze-y post-rock from British-based Moin makes textures of ominous spoken word fragments, chunky guitar, electronic samples and doom-metal heaviness. The legendary John Cale powers through a two-hour set from his enormous catalogue. The DJ sets in the Unsound Club and the closing party at iconic Adelaide venue Ancient World work on a primal level: flashing lights, smoke, alcohol and the intensity of music driving limbs into hours of dance.
As a winter festival, Illuminate transforms the darkness, generating awe with the unexpected sound and shapes that bodies and voltage can make. It’s a constellation across a city, where the electricity must be felt to be understood.
Kosa Monteith travelled to Adelaide with the assistance of Illuminate Adelaide Illuminate Adelaide continues until July 20.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Beam me up".
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