Night Lights: Urban Light Festivals and Branding Future Cities through Media Art

Urban light festivals, featuring massive architectural projection mapping spectacles and street-level interactive light sculpture, have become increasingly prevalent in North American cities in the past decade. Following in the tradition of son et lumière and nuit blanche events at historical landmarks and global metropolises, the urban light festival promotes a sense of wonder and enchantment while also highlighting landmarks and monuments and showcasing a variety of artists working with media in public spaces. These events transform redeveloping downtown spaces in mid-sized cities like Cincinnati and Baltimore into nocturnal playgrounds for audiences of all ages, continuing modernist connections between urban illumination and the oneiric city as well as advancing the technocratic ideals of the Smart City. While most scholarship on urban screens focuses on mediatized commercial centers in larger, global cities, this paper examines how urban light festivals construct imaginings city life and narrate urban futures within more regional contexts, focusing on festivals in small to mid-size cities in the United States located in downtown districts in the midst of gentrification. I argue that while these festivals can offer platforms for engaging and even challenging public art, they can also render the city into an image rather than a dynamic space of social encounters. Artworks and curatorial decisions that consider spectacle’s broad audience as a medium for engagement and interaction rather than a marketing metric can turn the urban light festival into a force for innovative and enriching public art rather than merely branding the city for development.