Gimme the light, and you shall receive the praise (2025)

Date

3 October 2024

Venue

Bar Temp

For

nonnonnon

Event

Mutant Club

Post-screen strategy for low-tech rooms

This piece grows directly from a practical question: what if the venue has no projector, and sometimes almost no lighting? If I cannot assume projector or lighting, I ask the audience to become the light system.

I invite people to scan a website, grant camera and flashlight permission, and turn their phones into moving strobes. Their batteries become my spotlight; their recording devices become part of the stage instead of only documenting it. Later in the set, I may ask them to scan again if the crowd is smaller than expected.

I am interested in DIY methods that turn audience assets (phones, attention, batteries) and space assets (walls, darkness, existing light) into part of the piece itself. The goal is not only to make it work, but to make the room feel visually strong. At the same time, I try to rely less on dragging in a big screen as the default solution — while still craving the scale of massive LED architecture, the kind you can feel from far away in large US venues.

How the system works

Each phone joins through the browser. The site requests camera and flashlight access, then drives flashlight pulses from each device camera stream. Strobes do not sync together — each phone runs its own tempo, randomly set between 120 and 180 BPM, so the crowd becomes a distributed, out-of-phase light field.

Before and late in my set, I would beg the audiences to give me some more light as an inspiration — as a spotlight — and in exchange, I would continue to give them my sound back.

Gimme the light performance (Instagram)