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.

The work seen in the video (bottom) was designed as three panels distributed across a 30-metres wide building facade. This spatial treatment of projected imagery, an the four channel spatial soundscape, conform with sculptural understandings of space. Unlike imagery on small screens and devices that can be ‘looked at’, the work cannot be experienced the same way twice. This approach uses the phenomenology associated with architectural form, and embodied experience in open air environments. It can only be understood through its spatial experience in three dimensions at full scale. It requires bodily immersion, motion and actual presence in its physical space, at scale, and in its intended reception site.