For this year’s Lowlands Festival we created ‘Lift’, a continuously changing, mystical, 18m high light sculpture that sparked the curiosity and imagination of more than 48.000 visitors during this 3 day iconic music festival in The Netherlands.

Inspired by the festival’s theme ‘Kiss Another Sky’, the dream of another world, and the excitement of experiencing something completely new, we set ourselves the goal to create a unique sculpture that would stand out in this energetic surrounding, a tower of light to function as a central meeting point, a point of orientation, that can be seen from everywhere.

Inside the 18m high sculpture there was a moving LED platform that projected both black & white, and coloured shadows on the outside of the tower, creating a calm, almost serene experience to contrast the busy, loud and energetic elements of the festival.

With this larger than life tower we wanted to show the audience white light in two different ways, resulting in two different kinds of shadows. Being an entertaining mystery to some, and a challenging puzzle to others…

About the realisation of this project

MOJO, the organisation behind Lowlands approached us to create a unique light sculpture for this year’s festival. “I came across Studio Dennis Parren’s magical CMYK lamp and was so intrigued by its elegance, that I wondered how it would look if it were to be 20x bigger…” says Eric van Eerdenburg, festival director of Lowlands.

As you can imagine, a festival like Lowlands is filled with music, excitement, energy and happy people. Happy people with high expectations, looking to experience something they’ve never seen before. With that in mind we set out to create Lift, a temporary sculpture that would be a performance on its own amongst artists like Kendrick Lamar, Major Lazer and The Chemical Brothers.

The 18 high sculpture made out of scaffolding was built by the very best climbers you can find, and fitted with 80 triangular banners, 250m of steel cables and over a 1000m of evenly divided straps to create the shadow effects. The ‘light-robot’ inside the tower consisted of a computer-controlled LED platform that was fitted with 4 LEDs producing over 1000W of bright light and moved up and down in sync with the program of the light.

“This has been a great project to work on, from working together with the Lowlands-team at the drawing table, to realising the sculpture and seeing it come to life in the middle of such a great festival like Lowlands.” says Dennis Parren. “It’s a new chapter for our studio and gave us a lot of inspiration and ideas for new and future projects!”