Meet at 3.45pm at the entrance of Sky Tunnel (North Colonnade - near Canary Wharf DLR station).

This walk will explore Canary Wharf’s Winter Lights Festival. This annual festival features several light-based installations and artworks. Each year the festival presents a different selection of installations (a total of 11 in 2015 and 18 installations in 2016), which are located in distinct areas of Canary Wharf and provide distinct levels of interaction.

Walking through the installations offers a unique opportunity to explore the peculiar vistas and ambiences of a modern business district while enjoying a selection of evocative and beautifully illuminated artworks, each of them proposing a dialogue with the urban environment through a different perspective.

The walk should discuss the relationships between the installations, the people (as viewers or participants of the artworks) and the surrounding built space. On this walk, we will reflect upon and discuss a range of topics, for example:

How do the installations contribute to the overall experience of the space?
To what extent each of the installations is able (or not) to encourage interaction?
What is the capacity of the installation to entice social encounters, bringing together not only families and friends but also strangers?
What are the most striking aesthetic qualities of the installations, in regard to the bodily and sensory engagement they afford?

This walk will be led by Andre Afonso, Bartlett School of Architecture

Photo by Andre Afonso.

Look, feel, move: experiencing interactive media installations in Canary Wharf