Mood Lighting

The stage at the 2008 Hip Hop Honors Awards.

Artlumiere worked with German firm Casa Magica to illuminate the 42-story Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh in November. Projectors positioned on the ground and surrounding buildings covered the facade with letters and stained glass imagery inspired by the Gothic-style architecture and Johannes Gutenberg's introduction of movable type.

In May, Google promoted its new artist themes for iGoogle, a customizable personal home page, with an outdoor gallery of light projections in New York's meatpacking district. San Francisco-based experiential marketing firm Obscura Digital animated art by notables like Marc Ecko, Jeff Koons, and Michael Graves, then projected the video onto several buildings.

For the gala opening of the Chado Ralph Rucci exhibit at the Phoenix Museum of Art in March, Kinetic Lighting incorporated elements of the tabletops into decorative wall illuminations. Soft-edged circles and ovals emulated river rock from centerpieces, in shades of blue to give the effect of water.

For IBM's Beatlemania-themed Golden Circle event in Bermuda last May, New York's Fourth Wall Events worked with West Virginia-based Dennis Nothaft Special Event Production to create a 1960's vibe using 18-foot-tall gerbera daisy lights with glowing centers and neon-lined petals.

Herrick Goldman of HG Lighting Design Inc. created a variety of effects for the dining spaces at the Brooklyn Museum's Brooklyn Ball last April. In one section, long, streaky lines of light emphasized the textural quality of the surrounding brick walls and ceilings while mosaic and swirling cloud-like illuminations flashed in from another dining area.

For the 2008 Hip Hop Honors Awards in New York, VH1 worked with London-based production firm Stufish and Los Angeles lighting company Full Flood to design 10-foot-tall letters that spelled out the name of the show across the stage. LED panels on each letter displayed colorful, constantly changing graphics.

JKLD created an environmental light sculpture of sorts for the Y-3 fashion show held last September in New York. Tying into the raw, unfinished look that producers Villa Eugenie and OBO conceived, 150 two-tube fluorescent fixtures were positioned at various heights over the edges of the runway.

For Quintiles Transnational Corporation's global leadership meeting in Hawaii last January, New York-based Barkley Kalpak Associates created installations of Versa Tubes to illustrate the event's "Turn Up the Volume" theme. The tubes changed colors as music played to give the impression that the room was engulfed in a sound wave.

PR and event marketing firm the Donahue Group designed imagery and disc-shaped screens looming over Beverly Hills' Two Rodeo for the Walk of Style ceremony honoring shoe designer Manolo Blahnik last September. ShowPro designed the lighting and projected shoe-based kaleidoscopic imagery and live-camera feeds from concealed positions within the backs of custom-built lounge seating.

Levy Lighting NYC engineered an outdoor dance floor for a private event in East Hampton in August. A steel structure with a low profile frame held rows of wicker baskets lit from within. Sound-sensored LED tubes covered the sides of the structure, and additional overhead lights projected moving patterns on the dance floor.