Illuminating York Festival

The Illuminating York Festival is an annual event in which, basically, the city puts lights on things. Now, this may sound kind of lame, but it is actually kind of cool. They illuminate various (mostly historic) stuff with various colored lights and hold different exhibitions and some museums offer special "torchlit" (that's by flashlight for us Americans) tours. To the right is an example- a section of the Medieval wall running around St Mary's lit up in blue & green. It is kind of cool because they hold this the weekend before and the weekend of Halloween, so you can go get your spook on with mood lighting! They also do several, well, lightshows for lack of a better word. One, entitled Vespertine, was projected onto one of the courtyard walls at King's Manor (that's where I go to school!) and focused on nocturnal wildlife.

Here's a section from the show featuring predators after a hedgehog. There was also this weird thing in a square where they projected laser patterns down at the ground from a crane way up above. The crane also had a camera and the feed was projected onto a screen, so you saw the crane's perspective of all the little people playing in the light patterns. It sounded really cool on the festival website, but was actually just kind of eh. But, there WAS the world's coolest etch-a-sketch.

This is just the tail end of one artist's session, but basically, people draw on tablet things and it is projected onto the Multangular Tower (which you might remember from a previous post.)

Most of the really fun historic building/museum stuff doesn't happen until next weekend, but hopefully I won't come down with swine flu like everyone else and will be able to go and tell you all about it.

On a complete side note, if you have not yet received a postcard, I swear it is coming, but the UK postal service is on strike, so nothing is being sent out of the country right now. If you would like a postcard and have not yet told me so, please let me know and get me an address to send it to either by facebook or email if you don't feel comfortable posting it here (I wouldn't blame you.)

Today I had the fun experience of talking to Amanda (hi Amanda!) who's in Japan. Fun times with time differences. Also, hearts to everyone who's kept in touch; its nice to have pals from home to talk to :)