Big Trombone–an urban media art installation at the Big City Lights Festival, 2024  

by Peter Thiedeke, Chris Stover, and John Ferguson 

Big Trombone is an urban media art installation that used projected imagery and generative audio to critique the top-down transformation of the public sphere mediated by technologists, urban planners, and the private sector corporate agenda (Habermas 1992). This creative arts research is situated within the discourse surrounding media art as interrogator of sociotechnical urban change in the so-called smart city (Ag et al. 2016) and civic hacking as resistance to the commodification of the public sphere (de Waal and de Lange 2019). 

Big Trombone rejected standardised models of aestheticism associated with public art commissioned by city officials, usually centred on visual spectacle for economic value. Instead, its distorted soundscape and immersive 300 square metre visual field enhanced the cultural value of its public reception site and the local community's well-being through a unique form of urban acupuncture. Rather than complying with the functional demands of urban infrastructure, this intervention aimed to establish an alternative consciousness of the city’s systems to create new energy and demonstrate the possibilities of what might be missing in day-to-day existence. Big Trombone provided citizens with cathartic relief to the rational city life by interrupting its pragmatic nature and the mundane experience of its day-to-day life with an irrational experience that distorts the relationships between image and sound an their exaggerated scale and form, and how perceptions of the urban environment can be augmented through irrational confluence.

Big Trombone was selected by Rosie Dennis, the Artistic Director of Placemakers Gold Coast, and selected for the Big City Lights Festival for exhibition in the Southport CBD from June 21 to July 7, 2024. The festival, attended by more than 15,000 people, was presented by Experience Gold Coast, The City of Gold Coast, and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Treaty, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Communities and the Arts.

Video documentation of Big Trombone in Regent Lane, Southport, The City of Gold Coast from June 21 to July 7, 2024

The 00:10:40 Video rendering for the three image panels and sound for the Regent Lane installation

The work seen in the video above was designed as three panels distributed across a 30-metres wide building facade. This spatial treatment of projected imagery, an the four channel spatial soundscape, conform with sculptural understandings of space. Unlike imagery on small screens and devices that can be ‘looked at’, the work cannot be experienced the same way twice. This approach uses the phenomenology associated with architectural form, and embodied experience in open air environments. It can only be understood through its spatial experience in three dimensions at full scale. It requires bodily immersion, motion and actual presence in its physical space, at scale, and in its intended reception site.

Details–still images rendered from the projected video imagery