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.