Last year’s visual experience of the Main and Dome stages left us breathless many times. We can always count on the Global Illumination team to level up the the overall festival adventure, give us something to feast not only our eyes on, but also inspire a psychedelic journey of mind and soul. This will be no less true this year, when they were inspired by the 2018 festival’s ‘Labyrinth’ inspirational concept. But let’s keep that a surprise!

However, to mark this wonderful day when there is only one month to go exactly before Paradise Welcomes us back into its embrace and we are blown away by what the masters of visual extravaganza have dreamed up for us this time, take a stroll down memory lane with the ‘globally illuminated’ creators about how they brought to life the amazing visuals of the Main and Dome stages last summer. And then let your imagination run free, and your excitement build up for what’s awaiting us in just 4 weeks’ time.

By BlackBird –

We were talking with the two main designers that brought us the visual experience of last year’s Main and Dome stages, David Vigh and Zsuzso Koszti, about the process, the results, human connections, inner creativity and the all-embracing equilibrium.

/David Vigh, Zsuzso Koszti, Antonin Krizanic/

Zsuzso decided to join the Global Illumination team three years ago, after she had first seen David’s 2015 Main Stage manifestation. As the fruit of their collaboration, in 2017 Zsuzso got the opportunity to pour her concept into form and realize her visions called down from higher realms on to the Dome’s organic stage, while David did the same on the Main last year yet again.

When designing the visuals, they basically incorporated the different kinds of spirituality arising from the energetic properties of the two stages’ functionalities. The result was that the Dome got a female, while the Main got a male identity, reflecting the perhaps most dominant counterparts of our bipolar world.

The Dome, with its the outer, half-sphere (or let’s just call it as it is, female breast) shaped roof structure is a magical world where one can relax in the embrace of music, while processing the outside world’s impulses. According to the female member of the designer duo, the concept was essentially about creating forms and formations that invite the participant on an inner journey, creating a channel between the outside and inside worlds, as an analogy with how people have been using formations for centuries, to meditate.

“The abstract elements symbolize sympathy through signs of unity and harmony, so it’s an organic gate to an inner dimension. The installation aims to take you on a journey, exploring different states of consciousness and finally, finding your inner peace, because peace comes from within. The Dome set design has the female energies, which are aggressiveness, safety, mysteriousness, smoothness – not aggressive, but comforting, still psychedelic, that should act as a portal to consciousness,” Zsuzso describes the ‘feminine part’ of the project.

In contrast to the self-reflective impulses, the Main Stage could be seen more as a kind of frequency generator, where we can pulsate together with the music and the dancing crowd, reaching higher level energy planes.

“The entire material world is nothing but vibration. When we experience the ocean of infinite waves surging within, the eternal dance of the countless vibrations within every atom of the body. As you experience the reality of matter to be vibration, you also start experiencing the reality of the mind: consciousness, perception, sensation and reaction.”

And it really is true, looking at the Main Stage visuals, one gets a feeling as if they were facing a three-dimensional tunnel that draws you in through these kinds of realizations, creating a higher state of mind.

So, the perfect counterpart of the accepting, introspective female energies of the Dome is the pulsating, energizing male pole of the Main Stage.

The base of the inspiration and concept in both cases was to create a pathway with the visual experience through which people can step into another spiritual realm, aided by the power of the totality of colors, shapes and the music that directly affects the mind.

“I think we relay our vision and some sort of open essence of creating on inner image. We are all of us different, and unique, therefore the vision that we create must be unique as well. I think it’s just a matter of accessing those sources of the imaginary inside, actually, the skull, the pineal land, where we can all create this vision. I think it’s just a matter of finding the right way,” says David about the creative process.

“We are all musicians too, or live constantly in music. Music is the most important inspiration, music and visuality are inseparable in our creative processes. Our visions are basically reflections of inner musical landscapes. Getting inspired by external stuff, but finally, the image must be created within you, in your pineal gland.”

During the creative process, the Global Illumination team wanted to push the boundaries of ‘design culture’ far enough to make the end results unlike anything else that the festival audience had ever seen before. So the process of planning is just as important to them as the end result itself.

“We think it’s important not to follow anything seen before, to try to push the envelope.”

“In the meantime we learn a lot about ourselves and about how to work together with others, while we hope that by the end of the process we will become better people and artists. Last year this was especially true for the Dome, considering that we hadn’t worked there before, so the space itself was unknown to us, and it was mainly Zsuzso who had to face the fact that many people have different viewpoints about a certain thing. She had to rethink and rework certain aspects many times, and it was also a part of the process to let things go, things that we thought were important. This is why in the end we could only use half of the elements we had earlier planned, otherwise the Dome’s structure would have collapsed,” they tell me smiling.

“It’s useful if you’re flexible, less fixed, it’s not a weakness, but a strength when you can rethink things, since while you’re keeping it alive, you make it more. Many times, opposed to what’s planned, the project coming to life in your hands becomes much more  through collaboration than it was in the beginning, since the whole O.Z.O.R.A. is a pyramid of creative powers that a huge amount of people take part in and add to from themselves.”

“Last year it was magic again to see the Dome and the Main Stage come to life under artists like Aural Eye, Datagrama or ST25. On the Main Stage we feel the vibration of these many energies rebounding, coming out of the stage and flowing back through the dancing crowd.”

“For us this form of expression is about the team and connecting, this is why it’s always uplifting to experience other people’s work on the platform designed by us. Above the visual catharsis, the people-part is mutual inspiration, new friendships, networking and raising our visual family to a global level, which is essential if we take our endeavours towards global enlightenment seriously.”

Walking along the shop row and looking at the facial expressions, the movement of the people coming towards me, I often notice how you can exactly see where they are coming from, where they have been, which energy field they had spent the last few hours in, as if swallowing up and re-manifesting its energies.

The Main Stage can be seen more as having a male identity, where the masculine powers of creation come to life, lifting us to a plane of higher vibration, and this way acting as the perfect counterpart of the Dome’s soft, inward-turning emotional world, where we can process the impulses that affect us. Filling the principle of polarity with content, the designers gave us the opportunity to achieve a state of balance through their realization of the festival’s living spaces, which is basically part of the festival’s mission, and the essence of last year’s concept: creating ‘equilibrium’.

Just as in the everydays we experience outside the festival gates, in these 10 days too, we need to create a balance in body and soul, to integrate various polarities, through the cycles of experiencing and processing. Night and day, light and darkness, sound and quiet, they all vibrate within us, as without silence there would not be music either. Without darkness , you can’t see the lights, this is the structure of our bipolar world, opposites cannot exist without one another. What’s essential is to be in equilibrium, in everything you do. Live high and low. Move and stay still. Embrace all sides of who you are.

Visuals by:

AURAL EYE
Alina Anca, Răzvan Pascu, Daniel Bega, Eranio Petruska
https://www.facebook.com/auraleye
DATAGRAMA
João Baeira, David Negrão
http://datagrama.webs.com

GLOBAL ILLUMINATION
Antonin Krizanic, Kati Katona, Zsuzsó Koszti and David Vigh
https://www.facebook.com/globalilluminationnetwork
http://globalillumination.net

ST25
Rustamo Yusupov and Pavel Layne
Main Stage design and art direction: David Vigh at Global Illumination
Dome stage design: Flux (Zsuzsó Koszti)
Assembly and amazing CNC work by Krisztián Stiaszni at Vectorline
LED art by Viktor Vicsek, Péter Márton and Herczeg Tamás.
Technical support: Adorján Triff at Mogul Audio
Additional animations by Máté Fekete, Ákos Ezer and Tamás Páll.
Peter from Slovakia for the handpainted decoration at the Dome.