LLUM Barcelona 2025

Syllabus

Credits: 2024: La Cremada

Context

The Llum BCN festival is organized by the Barcelona Institute of Culture (ICUB). It takes place during the month of February to coincide with the Festival de Santa Eulalia.

Llum BCN is a festival of lights. For three nights a part of the city is selected as the backdrop for light installations by professionals and academic institutions. The year 2024 marks the 13th edition of Llum BCN and the 10th participation of IAAC:

Location

Llum includes installations from professionals, universities, and institutions. The locations for the event are selected and assigned by the ICUB (Institut de Cultura de Barcelona). Until 2017, Llum BCN took place in the Gotico neighborhood of Barcelona. In 2018 the festival moved to Poblenou district: a change of location, which created a new challenge that brought new strategies of the treatment of light and space. The neighborhood of Poblenou is in continuous change. Industrial heritage, new architecture, urban art, chimneys, granes, artists, and technology cohabitate, turning the city into an open and urban architectural show.

After some editions where Parc del Centre de Poble Nou was hosting the event for a healthy environment and regulatory reasons, Llum was back on the streets of Poblenou.

The announcement of this year’s new location will be shared on the first day of the seminar.

Syllabus

The city of Barcelona and Llum Festival challenges Iaac to design an ephemeral light installation with the following theme:

“Public space is freed from the rigidity of functionality to open up to transformation and change, becoming another and new reality for three nights. The artistic gestures that intervene on the buildings, streets, facades and squares play with the limits of our perception to make us realize that the environment is an entity in constant mutation, which is the identity of the places we pass through and the societies that we exist are fluctuating ideas and in continuous construction.

Inhabiting the fascinating moment of transition from day to night, when the forms we perceive change, as do the ways of acting, between us and towards what surrounds us, the play of light at large scale over the territory is an invitation to discover the potential for change and to explore the elasticity that it allows us to think and act from the point of view of fluidity.”

IAAC has always used the Llum BCN Festival as a platform for interaction research, particularly “massive interaction” and the study of a crowd of people interacting while understanding their role in the interactive system. This year we will extremely focus this research into interaction with the audience while practising Visual Programming, Physical Computing and welcoming other cutting age new technologies.

We also will intend our Llum pavilion to be designed off-the-grid, cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero.

Learning Objectives

At course completion the student will:

Develop a 1:1 interactive installation that has a capacity to engage people concurrently and trigger critical thinking.
Create content collectively while developed specifically by every researcher involved in the seminar.
Produce a professional installation by collaborating in well-defined groups.
Employ Visual Programming, Physical Computing, Computer Vision, and other technical strategies to achieve an interactive environment.