Lights And Friends

[hiddenpaw]

Went out last night to take a look at the Cambridge E-Luminate festival; a collection of lighting installation spread around the city. It was a good evening although to be fair not for the intended reason. The Festival it's self was pretty underwhelming. Most of the installations were small and scruffy little things. Some would have been great in a gallery setting or gathered in one place somewhere quite dark, but not worth tramping across the city for one was in a shop with the shutters down. Of the big ones The display on the front of Kings college was pretty simple but brilliantly effecting and possibly the one piece worth seeing with big slabs of changing colour illuminating the front of the building. There was also a church where the lighting changed colour depending on the sound and music inside. The other two big pieces were less impressive. One was a projection mapped on to the front of the grand arcade. I suspect it could have been good, but the powerful street lamp on the opposite side of the street left the whole thing washed out and faint and where as most windows were blanked out so the projections could be seen on them one entire floor of windows were brightly lit destroying the effect of the over all piece. The Other projection on to a building was really just a video somebody had made on computer with kids pictures flying towards it projected on to the front of a building. It really could have been any building and where as the projection could have been randomly generated buy computer on the fly it was in fact just an AVI on a loop which was very disappointing. It just felt it missed the whole point of being on the side of a building and really it was less impressive than if somebody had just left a standard windows screen saver running.

All in all it was pants but I still had a great night because it was Shaggy, Lee Armstrong and I questing round Cambridge and stopping off for a nice dinner at the Anchor a pub/restraunt with a very nice waitress on her first night who's side we immediately took against her manager who was just unpleasant in a manner none of us could pin down. we ended up at the Elm. Really nice pub with a nice atmosphere and Lee and Shaggy tell me the beer is really good there too.

In short it may have been a futile quest but who cares when one is questing in such good company.