John Featherstone, principal at design group Lightswitch, is the lighting director and creative director for Illumination, and often uses Elation Professional fixtures in his designs. This year, he had the opportunity to be the first anywhere to use Elation's new weatherproof Proteus Beam moving head and incorporated several of them into the show as a harsh outdoor winter test for the recent LDI award-winning product.
"We've had a great working relationship with the Elation team and have relied on Elation fixtures as part of our 'secret sauce' for Illumination for years," Featherstone stated. "When they were looking for a 'beta test' site for the Proteus, I was flattered. I believe it's the world's first IP65-rated automated arc source fixture and as a long-running, cold weather project Illumination provided an excellent real world test."
Many visitor-favourite lighting experiences at Illumination return year after year but Lightswitch always brings new design surprises each year, some of which require new fixture types to realise. The Proteus fixtures, supplied by Intelligent Lighting Creations (ILC), are used to anchor a new area of the light experience called Fantasy Forest, the event's dramatic grand finale, where, in the Arboretum's hedge garden, pencil-thin pillars of dense light stretch skyward synchronized to music.
The Proteus fixtures are placed ground level on small custom wooden platforms that were built by vendor ILC. "The fixtures sit out all night, come rain, wind or snow," Featherstone reports alluding to Chicago's infamous winter weather, which has reportedly posed no issues for the IP65-rated fixtures, or lamps, over the four weeks since the event began. "All of the bearings and moving parts were designed by Elation for extremes of temperature and no water enters the device so there is nothing to freeze! We are more than satisfied with the brightness using the CMY wheels. The fixture has plenty of output and the colour change is super-fast."
(Jim Evans)
