The Rise of LX Injected, The Centre for Social Innovation, and the Party to End All Parties

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Natural and fluorescent light

I am kinda loving life.  A lot.  This last week, a new venture that I started with Amanda Lynne Ballard got its wings and took off – LX Injected.

What does LX Injected do?  We create large scale light art.  We also aim to change the world through light.

Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation just bought a new building in which to create and innovate, and they threw a monster party in said building.  The Party to End All Parties was on Friday of this last week, and people did much rejoicing.  LX Injected was asked to come and turn the space into a work of art in which people could come together and have a blast.

Enjoyment was what we aimed for, and that’s what happened.  We also got to work with some amazing people (Tonya and Colleen, you both rock) and we were fortunate enough to be able to light up a massive, open, and beautiful space.

Check out some images from the evening, courtesy of Amanda Lynne – and also check out the Centre for Social Innovation’s website.  They’re doing really freaking cool stuff.  Life changing stuff.  You might be asking yourself what exactly – so here’s a blurb from the Centre’s website:

The Centre for Social Innovation is a dynamic space in downtown Toronto, Canada. Our mission is to spark and support new ideas that are tackling the social, environmental, economic and cultural challenges we face today. We’re creating the spaces that social innovation needs to thrive and we’re contributing a few of our own ideas along the way!

Cool.  What an amazingly guerrilla and fun design.  I really enjoyed this project!  Support the life changers, use your brains like you’re a ninja!

The first set of images here are of the initial site visit walkthrough with the lovely miss Colleen Diamond.  We chatted about the feel and purpose of the space, and how we could pull some good ol’ urban planning magic to turn our space into a “place.”  Colleen was also quoted during that meeting as saying “nerd is the new passion.”  We love you, Colleen!

After building some very simple fixtures, shopping some fixtures, and purchasing the right lamps (we went mostly 50W PAR20 halogen narrow floods and some 500W wash units for color and splash), we had the evening the night before to get into the space at dusk for hang and focus.

The space before the install:

Natural and fluorescent light
Windows

The Install Night

After the evening before spent building fixtures and wiring them up, the next evening before the actual event we had the space to play, experiment on the various surfaces with light, and get everything rigged and working.  It was an amazing evening, and that warehouse came alive!

Essentially, the design went for motion.  We accented the things we felt were important, created two separate saturated blue areas on contrasting sides of the space for people to be able to “cool off,” if you will from the white light shining on the walls.  With the brick walls themselves we chose to angle the spots grazing the walls to also create an implied motion around the space.  The space around the “bar” created in the venue was a great feeling for us – we lit the glasses and bar surface at a low angle, and through the windows of the space we were able to illuminate the faded but yet still amazing Coca-Cola logo on the side of the adjacent building.

The Bar and the Coke Logo

The Party

The evening was outstanding.  Great people, everyone having fun, people playing in the shadows we created, and people making their own shadows.  Amazing, fun, and I would do it again in a second.  Check out some pics from the party evening, and then below everything is a gallery of all of the shots.  Enjoy!

The gallery of images from the process:

All photos on this page are protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No-Derivitives license.  You can repost the photos and content as long as you give attribution to JimOnLight.com and LX Injected.  Photographer credit, unless otherwise noted, is Amanda Lynne Ballard.

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