The Tower and the Kaleidoscope

The certified number is 13,904.956 square metres — Guinness's largest permanent architectural projection-mapped display, thrown by forty projectors Panasonic built to survive the weather. The 2026 content schedule turned over on 1 August; there are several showings a night from around 7pm (earlier in winter), on green power. Organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's projection-mapping committee, it is a piece of civic infrastructure that happens to be a canvas. Worth the walk into Shinjuku after dark.

Before "immersive" was a marketing category, Julio Le Parc was building rooms that only finished when you walked into them. Tate Modern's survey — seven decades of the 97-year-old Argentine's kinetic light, mirrored distortions, and hand-cranked contraptions, open 8 June 2026 through 3 May 2027 — restores the participatory nerve of the 1960s GRAV group, where the viewer was the last component in the circuit. It is the deep history of nearly everything else in this issue. Go move something.

On the Delaware at Spruce Street Harbor Park, William Simard and Anthony Gagnon Boisvert have hung twelve glowing prisms — one per musician — that translate a score into colour and motion, a synesthete's orchestra you walk through rather than watch. Built with Philadelphia composers, free, and outdoors. It comes down 16 August; this is the last week to catch it.

Seventeen artists, and a materials list that runs from motion capture and generative software to deer hide and glass. Opening 25 September (through 3 January 2027), the Frist's Ingram Gallery show runs from Jakob Kudsk Steensen's flooded digital wetland Aquaphobia to Jacolby Satterwhite's CGI underworld We Are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other (2020) and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's The Substitute (2019), a northern white rhino resurrected to exist only on screen. The argument: decenter the human, and watch what the light does to everything left standing.

For its 27th edition — 25–30 August, with the free Village Numérique installation trail running 20 August through 3 September — MUTEK turns the Quartier des Spectacles into a self-guided circuit of audiovisual work under the banner Amplify & Resonate. The headline booking: Jeff Mills brings his Stargate immersive show to North America for the first time, alongside Rival Consoles, Matthew Herbert, and Fennesz with visual artist Lillevan. Six nights where the sound design and the light design are the same job.

Alice Cooper has never separated lighting from narrative — the theatre is the point — and the 2026 "Alice's Attic" production makes the whole stage a living set: practical scenery colliding with a massive upstage LED wall, Alice first appearing as a silhouette climbing out of a giant dusty book. Production designers Sooner Routhier and Curtis Adams — with lighting director Chris Noll and programmer Austin Schneider — run a fully automated rig (Robe Spiiders, Vari-Lite VL3600s, ACLs) across a huge dynamic range: "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" pared back to a single uplight and two rear washes, "Brutal Planet" cued hard to the bass hits. Storytelling first; spectacle on cue. Gear supplied by Bandit Lites.