In order to challenge people’s perceptions of Hull and offer different ways to experience the city, Hull UK City of Culture 2017 issued a brief for a major outdoor spectacle. It asked for an impactful and visually arresting, durational light art work to signal not only the end of a great year for Hull, but the beginning of a brighter, more confident future. Invited artists were to ask, where do we go from here?

The brief was for a work across key locations in Hull’s old town to expose and celebrate some of the less well-known areas of the city through colour, light and wonder. It imagined an immersive and dynamic experience to enliven the streets through light and people’s interaction with it. The light was to change the urban environment each evening through the winter and invite the public to promenade through a series of connected ‘lightscapes’.

Jason Bruges Studio envisaged a specially choreographed interplay of light, shadow and sound inspired by the city’s history as a centre for navigation. To encourage people to explore the city’s night-time streets, they employed a cast of 21 robots across four areas around Hull’s Old Town. As night descended, re-purposed industrial robots awakened and responded to the city’s architecture, interacting with one another and with Hull’s residents and visitors. At four sites, different configurations of robots used a wide range of light effects to highlight unseen places and encourage people to see the city of Hull in a new light.

View all the winning work from The Annual 2018 here.

Entrant/Creative Studio: Jason Bruges Studio. Creative Director: Jason Bruges. Project Lead: Kirstine Jaeger. Project Executive Producer: Niccy Hallifax. Technical Director: Tom Siddall. Production Manager: Martin Robinson. Senior Visualiser: Adam Heslop. Creative Technologist: Dominik Zisch. Executive Producers: Sam Hunt with Andrew Knight and Hazel Colquhoun (Look Up programming). CEO of Hull 2017 City of Culture: Martin Green. Project Marketing Manager: Sarah Moore. Director of Communications: Ben McKnight.