Optical Opera House

For three weeks each year, Sydney, Australia, transforms into a rainbow of projected art. The images designed for the city’s iconic Opera House are among the highlights of the festival, called Vivid Sydney. This year, six contemporary First Nations artists created works for the Opera House’s sails. These artists represent different clans and territories in Australia.

Each projected work celebrates Australia’s indigenous history and culture. The visual artists who designed the images use symbols and patterns to illustrate the ancient stories. 

Bringing the images to life was a large, complicated task. Artists in Motion—a lighting and technology company—turned the artists’ works into an animated sequence. Then they projected the images onto the Opera House’s curved sails at a giant scale. The team used 16 large projectors with massive pixel counts to achieve crisp, vibrant images. 

A record-breaking 2.3 million people attended this year’s festival. Executive producer Stella Carmody explained, “Our aim was to create beautiful and engaging work that augments and shifts the reality of the building.”