Visitors with their hands raised between two rows of glowing LED columns in the underground garage, lit in cyan, white and magenta, speakers on stands at either side.

Case study · Interactive A/V installation · Lumen Festival, Waterloo

The Commons

An atmosphere that belongs to everyone inside it, and to no one.

The Commons turned the tragedy of the commons into something you can stand inside. For one night of Lumen 2026, an underground parking garage beneath Waterloo City Centre held a shared atmosphere of light and four-channel sound, and the condition of that atmosphere was decided by whoever happened to be in the room.

Every visitor was given a voice and a column of light of their own. Hands held low kept the room in balance: a glowing, generative soundscape that belonged to everyone present. Every raised hand made the whole thing brighter, wider and rougher, for everybody. Nobody could break it alone, and nobody could fix it alone. The empty room was the most beautiful version of the piece, and each person who walked in made it a little more complicated.

The design choice that mattered most was the slow recovery. When the room tips into noise, it takes much longer to calm down than it took to get loud, and it only comes back when the whole room lowers its hands. Damage is quick and repair is slow, which is the most honest thing the piece has to say about emissions.

Lumen draws a big crowd, so the piece had to work without a queue. Body tracking let a whole group shape the sound together instead of taking turns, and the light and sound spilled out far enough that people walking past got something too. The garage had nothing to hang lights from, so the LED columns stood on their own frames, and the low concrete ceiling became part of the light show.

How it works

  1. You are given a voice

    Step into the tracked zone and you're quietly assigned a sound — a softened trace of a greenhouse gas source like aviation, traffic or livestock — and a column of light that follows you. Wherever you walk, your voice moves with you across four speakers.

  2. Your hands feed it

    Held low, everything stays bright, clear and calm. Raise your hands and your voice and your light get brighter, wider and coarser. There are no notes to play and no way to get it wrong.

  3. The room tips together

    No one person can wreck the atmosphere. If enough hands go up at once, the whole room tips into glare and noise. When the hands come down, it recovers slowly, and it can't be calmed by anyone alone.

A row of hanging white light tubes in front of four visitors, arms stretched out and raised, everyone looking up at the light.A visitor in a wheelchair, in a red hood and ball cap, laughing up at the light while two people beside them throw their arms overhead among the glowing tubes.A visitor in a striped glove and beaded bracelets reaching up between tall tubes that fade from cyan to pink at their tips.Three people holding hands and turning in a circle in blue light between two rows of white columns, an orange traffic cone behind them.Seen from behind, four visitors raising their arms toward a row of glowing tubes, with rippling blue light spread across the concrete ceiling above.The whole installation from outside — two frames of light tubes, speakers on tripods, and the garage ceiling washed in magenta and green.

Credits

  • Artist — Alex MacLean
  • Commissioned by — City of Waterloo — Lumen 2026
  • Lighting fixtures & rig — Other World Productions
  • Documentation video — Turbo Tambourine
  • Built with — TouchDesigner · Bitwig Studio

Next project: Concrete Canopy →

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