Badenoch will get lit up tonight!
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The Cairngorms is featuring in a huge outdoor artworks event this summer.
Green Space Dark Skies will include the mountains in a unique project led by outdoor art organisation Walk the Plank as part of UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK – a UK wide celebration of creativity taking place in 2022.
Thousands of people in the UK, including over 1000 in Scotland, have been recruited to create large-scale outdoor artworks in 20 of the most outstanding landscapes between April to September.
The gatherings will be created at dusk by local participants, referred to as lumenators. They will be guided along pathways or waterways carrying smart lights that will enable digital choreography to be captured on film, while also being sensitive to the night-time environment.
Each short film will incorporate the stories of the people and places featured and will be broadcast online after the event. Lumenators, as well as the general public, are also encouraged to share their own connections to the landscape through Green Space Stories, a citizen science project to create an online archive of stories detailing humans' relationship to nature.
Developed by graduate engineers at Siemens, the hand-held lighting technology, called Geolights and carried by participants, uses existing wireless programmable lights and incorporates something that's never been done before: the ability for the lights to be animated through geo-positioning, whereby the position of each light can be known in relationship to the others.
Today's event at Loch Insh Outdoor Centre will take place both on water and on land. Paddleboarders and kayakers will help to create patterns on the loch.
The artworks will be created at dusk. Lumenators will be guided along pathways or waterways carrying smart lights that will enable digital choreography captured on film, while also being sensitive to the night-time environment.
Green Space Dark Skies enables people from all walks of life to forge new connections with the countryside by supporting those who face cultural and physical barriers to experience our iconic landscapes. The series of gatherings will celebrate the countryside as well as encouraging our responsibility to take care of it for future generations.
Lumenators will have exclusive access to a packed daytime programme of outdoor activities from live music and storytelling workshops to VR experiences and water sports lessons.
Music directors Kapil Seshasayee and Willie Campbell of The Dalmar Chorus are working with local musicians to write soundtracks for the films, influenced by their participation in local workshops and their own experiences of the landscapes and communities.
Mr Campbell said: “Green Space Dark Skies is interesting, ambitious and a really exciting opportunity for us to do something new." Kincraig's own award-winning Merryn Glover, the Cairngorms' first writer-in-residence, will be leading workshops and collecting words inspired by people, nature and place from the local community in different languages (Scots, Gaelic, English and other languages) to create text for the film soundtrack. She will engage groups including Cairngorm Wild Swimmers and Colourful Heritage, which highlights South Asian presence in Scotland.
Movement co-ordinator Jo Davies represented the Royal Academy of Dance in the live broadcast of the parade for the Queen’s 90th Birthday celebrations. Her choreography work includes local productions of musicals which feature her talented pupils, and she has also choreographed numerous pantomimes and cabaret shows.
Helping Jo will be Aviemore's Heather Cooney, who gained her Msc in dance movement psychotherapy at Queen Margaret University, during which time she also performed in and co-created the opening ceremony for the 2012 Paralympics.
First brought to the Highlands on a one-year contract with Eden Court Creative as a dance development worker, she founded The Cairngorm School of Dance in 2014, and opened their Aviemore studio in 2019.
Emily Dodds, the project’s workshop leader, is a storyteller and science spoken word artist with an Msc in communicating science underpinning her work. She will work with the lumenators.
Participants will also be able to experience Scotland’s natural beauty in a bold and dynamic new way, thanks to an exciting collaboration from coders, musicians, graphic designers, and filmmakers.
Miro CoLabs - a British AR/VR collective - will be immersing lumenators in bespoke virtual-reality concerts which combine live music and virtual landscapes for performances which are guaranteed to engage all the senses.
