Loud and Quiet in Łódź

The major attraction of Light.Move.Festival 2022 is a series of projection mappings, but some light art works are on display, as well as music and other projects. So there's a lot to see and hear. A bit too much, maybe.

The question of the quality of art is a subjective one, don’t let any art critic claim otherwise. It’s always about personal taste. So, if I didn’t quite get the Light.Move.Festival, it’s not because it was bad, it just wasn’t up to my alley. 

How come? 

Mainly, the festival was too loud to my taste. The music was loud, the colours were loud and the flashing trinkets on sale everywhere and worn by everyone were especially loud. Maybe I’m just too Finnish or middle-aged (Fiddle-aged?), but it was all too much for me. 

I also have a problem with projection mapping pieces and their homogeneity, and the sugar coated mappings in Łódź gave no reason to change my mind. The projections were so similar, that I was surprised they were made by different artists. Pretty much all of them were painting façades with candy colours, adding whirling or wobbling cute animals and/or flowers, and some sparks to finish. With very interchangeable music. And one Porche commercial. Not my alley.

Students to the Rescue

As a silver lining, there was a bunch of wonderful artworks by students from Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Institute of Media Art, scattered around the festival. Some of them were in demo stage, but they had sincerity and artistic endeavour, which I do appreciate. The most subtle ones were often overwhelmed by the surrounding loudness of the festival, though, which could have been avoided with more careful placing of the artworks. 

Kamil Druks' artwork beat the surrounding loudness by being deliberately quiet. At first, I thought the flickering of parks's light posts was just a failure in the lighting system, but the design of the flicker told me this was no accident. Which the exhibition label confirmed. It also told me that the flickering was lights morseing “Consciousness”. Not only was the artwork beautifully designed, studying one very simple idea in depth, but it also drew a fine line between art and accident. If I was to decide, this fine piece of conceptual light art would be installed in the park permanently.

A still photo really doesn't tell much about Mr. Druk's artwork. See it in Youtube. 

The delicate Przebudzenie by Zuzanna Białecka was projected on a bed

Misty Reflection by Julia Podborączyńska and Joanna Bury
gave a chance to get lost in light for a while

Divinum Lumen was a student exhibition indoors.
This artwork is by either Włodzimierz Szymański, Klaudia Długołęcka or Andrzej Zwierzchowski,
from the Institute of Media Art. Please let me know, if you know the exact artist,
the exhibition info wouldn't tell.

Looking at You Looking at Me by Piotr Lewandowski and Karo Zacharski
was an ogling comment on constant visibility

Sparkling Joy, After All

Even if I didn’t find the festival that enjoyable, pretty much everyone else seemed to like it. And that’s what the big light festivals mostly are for. There were many happy, wide smiles to be seen, especially on the faces of the youngest audience segment. In particular under the many large mirror balls – and those sparks are something I get as well. You can't go wrong with a mirror ball!

 

Touristy Tip: Buying Train Tickets

The ticket reservation system of Polish Railways is archaic, to put it nicely. You may order tickets online, yes, but they are sent to you as paper tickets by mail and must be ordered centuries beforehand. So, I decided to buy my (mandatory) seat reservations to go with my Interrail ticket from the station in Lodz. According to my one experience: always find a clerk with whom you have a common language. My first two attempts ended up to the clerk waving their hands and talking Polish to me. Loud, since I didn’t understand. Even louder since I didn’t understand the loud version. Google translator had a bug in it, I guess, since judging on the clerk’s reaction, it translated my very polite "May I reserve a seat for this train on this day please" to "F*ck off you f*cking f*ck". Without the please, I believe. The third clerk spoke some English and everything went fine and dandy. With stamps and all.