Living lights: going for green gold at Vivid Sydney

For the past nine years Sydney’s annual festival of light, music and ideas – Vivid Sydney – has transformed the city and surrounds into a veritable wonderland of lights, sculptures and grand scale projections.

In 2018 the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) will be the first university to have its own Vivid Sydney installation, a living breathing “algae forest” of coloured light, taking algae out of the lab and into a very public, and international, arena.

Although algae sustain the health of our oceans and provide 50 per cent of the air we breathe, these microscopic plants don’t often get the credit they deserve. Director of the UTS Climate Change Cluster (C3) Professor Peter Ralph says the aim of the installation is to improve public perception of algae through a colourful, interactive and visually engaging display that will “shake off its ‘slimy’ image” and open viewers’ minds to algae’s potential as a revolutionary raw material in a changing world.

Read the full story in the UTS Newsroom.