RU 
EN Palace Square
November, 2nd-3rd 2019
The “Wonder of Light” Festival took place on Palace Square. For two evenings, the main square of the city turned into a digital garden, and guests and residents of St. Petersburg were immersed in the computer game atmosphere. In two days, the Festival gathered 200 thousand spectators.
The spectators would walk among the light art objects. The greatest artists of St. Petersburg worked on its creation. The square decorated with the giant Lego tulips and sparkling futuristic butterflies was an artwork by Anita Krupkina, the University of Westminster in London graduate. Sophia Batsova, another graduate of Westminster University, came to St. Petersburg especially for the Festival. Her participation in the cult American “Burning Man” 2018, for which she created the bent wood installation Error 101, is something to put a feather in her cap for. The art object Life 101 presented at the “Wonder of Light” Festival is a continuation of her American work. The installation symbolized an unattainable mysterious life that you cannot comprehend, but you can look inside – from the bottom up.
Another artist who presented his work at the Festival was Vilgeniy Melnikov, the founder of the experimental sculpture studio OfelyArt. He created a luminescent blown iron grotto that amazed the audience with its unusual shape.
The visitors saw many other artworks – space dandelions, pixel trees, digital flower avatars, holographic trees…
In order not to get lost in the makeshift garden, the team made an application with augmented reality (AR) technology. The application allowed the visitors to see the secrets of four installations (the audience was to find it themselves) and to learn more about each art object.
The light performance on the facade of the General Staff Building transported the audience to cyberspace. An exciting journey in search of lost artifacts took the audience through a digital castle, surreal halls, cyberpunk laboratories, dungeons, and other computer locations. At the end of this exciting adventure, the audience could release the source of light and defeat the forces of darkness.
