Big Trombone was an urban media art installation at the Big City Lights Festival, 2024. This experimental multi-channel projected image and spatial soundscape was a hybrid form of urban acupuncture, a civic hack in public space that aimed to supplant the humdrum of everyday urban existence. Big Trombone’s immense disfigured imagery and reverberating rhythms emanated from Regent Lane, spilling into Southport, a Central Business District of The City of Gold Coast, to create new energy and demonstrate the possibilities of what might otherwise be missing.
Big Trombone is an urban media art installation by Peter Thiedeke, John Ferguson, and Chris Stover that used projected imagery and generative audio to critique the top-down transformation of the public sphere mediated by technologists, urban planners, and the private sector corporate agenda (Habermas 1992). This research is situated within the discourse surrounding media art as interrogator of sociotechnical urban change in the so-called smart city (Ag et al. 2016) and civic hacking as resistance to the commodification of the public sphere (de Waal and de Lange 2019).
Big Trombone rejected standardised models of aestheticism associated with public art commissioned by city officials, usually centred on visual spectacle for economic value. Instead, its distorted soundscape and immersive 300-square-metre visual field enhanced the cultural value of its public reception site and the local community’s well-being through a unique form of urban acupuncture. Big Trombone provided citizens with cathartic relief from the logical flows of city life by interrupting the pragmatic and mundane nature of day-to-day life in the urban environment with an irrational urban experience.
Big Trombone was selected by Rosie Dennis, the Artistic Director of Placemakers Gold Coast, for the Big City Lights Festival. It was exhibited in the Southport CBD from June 21 to July 7, 2024. The festival, attended by more than 15,000 people, was presented by Experience Gold Coast, The City of Gold Coast, and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Treaty, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Communities and the Arts.
Big Trombone rejected standardised models of aestheticism associated with public art commissioned by city officials, usually centred on visual spectacle for economic value. Instead, its distorted soundscape and immersive 300-square-metre visual field enhanced the cultural value of its public reception site and the local community’s well-being through a unique form of urban acupuncture. Big Trombone provided citizens with cathartic relief from the logical flows of city life by interrupting the pragmatic and mundane nature of day-to-day life in the urban environment with an irrational urban experience.
Big Trombone was selected by Rosie Dennis, the Artistic Director of Placemakers Gold Coast, for the Big City Lights Festival. It was exhibited in the Southport CBD from June 21 to July 7, 2024. The festival, attended by more than 15,000 people, was presented by Experience Gold Coast, The City of Gold Coast, and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Treaty, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Communities and the Arts.
When Griffith University launched its Research and Innovation Plan (2025-2030), The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (research) chose an image of Big Trombone: https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/2229814/research-and-innovation-plan-2025-2030.pdf
