Green Space Dark Skies and CORE Lighting
Recently, CORE Lighting partnered with Walk the Plank and Siemens UK on Green Space Dark Skies, commissioned as part of the UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK festival. We were tasked with adapting our existing lighting technology to create a new, environmentally friendly, low impact lighting solution, which we called Geolight. This new low impact lighting was designed to cause less light pollution and was used in Green Space Dark Skies events across the UK.
Photo credit: Green Space Dark Skies, Valley of the Rocks, Exmoor National Park, Photo: André Pattenden
Green Space Dark Skies Events
Geolights were used by thousands of people in 20 beautiful locations to produce a stunning lighting display. Areas such as Dartmoor National Park and Three Cliffs Bay in Gower AONB were used to produce some incredible visual patterns in light at dusk.
Run by Walk the Plank, a team of outdoor arts experts who create incredible outdoor theatre and spectacle, Green Space Dark Skies was created to “celebrate nature, our responsibility to protect it, and everyone’s right to explore the countryside.”
Green Space Dark Skies is rooted in the belief that it is our job to protect our countryside. It is a project that will be carbon positive, producing less carbon than it removes from our atmosphere. And one of the main aims of the project is to empower everyone that takes part or engages with the project, through watching the films or using learning resources to make a positive difference in their local area and become caretakers of nature.
Green Space Dark Skies, Giant’s Ring, Lagan Valley AONB, Photo: Brian Morrison
CORE’s Involvement in Geolight lighting technology
Using innovative processing technology, Siemens developed a geo-locating lighting system to remotely control individual Geolights created by CORE Lighting. Participants in the project, known as Lumenators, held a single Geolight during each of the events, which took place between April and September across the UK. Each Lumenator moved according to a pre-arranged plan to create stunning visual shapes and effects relating to the location in which they participated.
Siemens’ geo-locating system was able to change the colour of every CORE Geolight individually, turning each Lumenator into a pixel to create a live work of art in the landscape.
The CORE Geolights themselves were manufactured in Gloucestershire using mostly UK supplied parts. The Geolights are comprised of LEDs, which keeps the weight down at just 1.5kg and makes the light itself able to be held comfortably without getting hot.
The electronic boards for the Geolight are manufactured in Stroud, Gloucestershire, just a few miles from the CORE Lighting HQ. The processing and machining of the light’s components are all done in the UK, and the flight cases, metalwork, and woodwork are all produced in the UK.
The only part of the lights that come from outside the UK are the raw extrusion lengths, which are shipped into the UK in bulk-from from a supplier in Greece as the tooling set up was already in place. But shipping the lengths in bulk to the UK and processing and machining them here vastly reduces the light’s carbon footprint and saves on transport space.
What’s more, almost all the parts within the Geolights are recyclable in some way. The Geolight is constructed of aluminium, wood, and rubber seals, with a lithium battery to power the electronics. Some higher energy consuming parts are unavoidable, however, such as the plastics on the top and bottom of the light. But, even these use less plastic and are much smaller than in previous versions of the Geolight – which was designed using our CORE ColourPoint and ColourPoint Mini as a starting point.
At CORE Lighting, we manufactured the Geolights to be robust and suitable for outdoor use with an IP65 weatherproof housing that is also able to withstand a drop of 1 metre multiple times.
We also manufactured the CORE Geolights to be adaptable for wheelchair users. The light itself has a large handle to make it easy to carry. But it can also be integrated with a bridle, making it much easier to be placed in a position that is comfortable for a wheelchair user rather than in their lap.
The CORE Geolights have proven to be a massive success in the Green Space Dark Skies project and all the events so far have been stunning examples of responsible light installation displays in nature.
If you’d like to watch the films of these events, visit the Green Space Dark Skies website.
For more information, contact us here.
