Good evening ladies and gentlemen.
Well, I'm not a superstar, a rock star, or something like that
which you can think from the start.
This happens because I wanted to talk
about light and public space tonight.
I'm a curator of the lights festival
in Prague, Czech Republic.
But first of all, I wanted to show you this.
This is a light art piece.
It's an interactive light art piece by one of my friends
called INITI, and it's called "TOUCH-ME-NOT".
The name of the piece in Czech language
refers to a herb, a plant, which,
if you want to touch it, it explodes.
So you can't touch it without destroying it or changing it.
I'm showing this to you because it speaks about
the nature of light,
about those aesthetic qualities of light
which somehow inspires me
and somehow arouses my imagination.
This is like the pieces.
You can try to touch the light and react with it.
Sometimes the light creates an object,
but it's not something you can touch.
It's illusive.
But it's also very dynamic and it's very fluid.
On the other hand, it stands there.
It's constant. It's something like a river
which changes all the time, but it stays the same.
So these qualities of light
they make me think about it very much
when I was working in the theatre.
I think we can stop the fog now. Thank you very much.
Okay, let's forget about light
and get some slides now.
So my name is Jan Rolnik,
I'm about to talk about light festival
which we organized in the Czech Republic, Prague,
in this tiny country in the middle of Europe
which has no sea.
Well yeah, about the city.
It looks something like this
when you wake up very early
in the morning in winter.
You have a chance to see it like this.
It's a city full of history.
Some 700 years ago it was one of the three
most important cities of western civilization.
But it's a long time ago.
And now, all the streets and all the walls
are full of these old ghosts.
People say it's a magical city because
things to see there.
There are some crazy sorcerers who tried
to make gold out of coal, or
living beings out of clay.
So, it's kind of a magical city.
I'm talking about this because
it's a city which arouses imagination.
When you're walking through it,
or at least when I do,
it makes me daydream.
And it makes me think about what can be.
About the people who are also creating the city...
Some 25 years ago, we had something we called
Velvet Revolution. That was a revolution
without violence, and we got rid of
the totalitarian communist regime.
And we started with democracy and capitalism.
We were very happy at the time.
I was nine years old.
But after some time, there was also some dissolution.
Somehow people started to follow ideas of
individualism, competition, consumerism.
This lasted for some 20 years.
Why I am talking about it is that
I feel that something is changing,
that people somehow started to share
their lives and their experiences together
in the streets of their city.
This is, for example, some event
which is organized twice a year in our city.
It's actually not financed by the city or government.
It's just a celebration of a city when
every bookshop, every cafe, every bar
just does something for their neighbors.
They just show what they have from the store.
And people just stop using cars.
They walk on the streets, they use bikes.
It's just a celebration of the public space of the city.
It's every year... bigger and bigger.
For me, it's a sign of willingness to participate
on the public space of the city,
on the story of the city.
There is one very nice quote which
I will quote in full now,
which tells beautifully about what I mean
talking about public space here.
It says: "It's a multi-layered structure of city life
which facilitates meeting
evokes emotion and enjoyment of beauty.
It inspires and irritates senses.
It offers both historical and current reflection of society.
In this sense, it is a cultural space comparable
with theatre, museum, concert hall or
imaginative world of a novel or a movie."
This means that every one of us
can take part on the story of our city,
and may reshape it, may change the meaning of it,
change the meaning of the space.
I think you all know this very well,
here in Taiwan and in Taipei.
Because you get to know this.
One of these picture is 3 months old,
and one of them is 3 days old.
This is a way how to make public space a statement,
and to make light a way how to participate
in this space, in this story.
Well, I just want to somehow take my part here
and I want to express my thumbs up
and fingers crossed to occupy Hong Kong here.
And take part on this happening
which is so fresh in time.
But, in our Czech Republic,
we already did our fights.
We don't have much to fight against at this moment.
So we just play with the city.
I've been talking about light and public space
in the city. So what we did is
we took these two things we love:
the city and light, and technologies,
and we put some emotions and imagination
in between them.
This is what somehow describes our idea.
This was an invitation for a second edition
of our festival, which takes place two weeks from now.
And in the first edition,
we became very, very successful with the festival.
We created something like a labyrinth
which was full of surprises,
full of unexpected meetings of the third kind, sometimes.
We use the city as a canvas,
on which we and the artists we invited can paint
and can create something new.
We use the historical background of the city
which I was talking about
to do something spectacular,
to do something different.
So sometimes we put some contrasting stuff in it.
For example, this installation,
this large-scale installation,
was created by a French artist: 1024 architecture.
It was suppose to make people "unquiet".
You can visit this tentative installation
it just drew you away to different times and place.
I will give you this video with sounds
so that you can understand what I mean.
So this makes people, somehow, unsure of
what's behind another corner,
what can attack them,
what's happening in the city.
What was great about it is that
suddenly, they started to see the city in a different way.
Their eyes changed. They started to see
the buildings that were there
in another way, in a different way.
Well, we also try to offer them
some pleasant kind of experiences.
This is one of them. It's a piece called "Cloud".
It's by two Canadian artists:
Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett.
Amazing people.
What this piece does greatly is
it gets people together.
It's one of the pieces when
multiple interaction is possible.
This is really difficult because
there are just rain chains
and you can just come and pull it
and make a little thunder above your head.
And you can do this with 30 other people.
And suddenly, you start to compete
and you start to play with the others.
It's a very nice thing.
Well, so we created, I showed you,
two of these installations.
We had 35 of them.
In four days, we had a quarter million visitors
in the city which were all astonished
and they were sharing one experience
in the city at night. So, we succeeded.
One thing that I want to say here is that
we feel the responsibility for the public space.
We fight very strongly not to sell it out,
not to sell out the artist,
not to sell out the audiences to the companies
who want to advertise in the public space.
And this is also very important to think of
when you're trying to do a festival like that.
Well, these are the powers of light in public space.
I will just let you see the last video
which I love very strongly.
I saw it like 100 times.
Again, because it's simple.
It's just two elements: light and face.
For me, it's strongly emotional.
It arouses inspiration.
My message for this is just: be creative with light.
Play with light in public space.
That's all I have for you. Thank you.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community