Illuminos are brothers Matt and Rob Vale, who for over 10 years have been creating visually inventive, memorable projection artworks and experiences. Our works range from very large scale illumination to small scale imagery, but always working to create something unique and specific to location and viewer. Formed around a principal of People, Site, Animation, and often combining elements of installation, dance, theatre, pyrotechnics and music, each project that we approach develops from an exploration of the emotions of an environment, aiming to capture the essence of a place, space or feeling as a shared moment of time. 

​

Our practice is inherently collaborative and cross-disciplinary. Wherever possible we seek to work with participants and partners to generate artwork, avoiding a tokenistic approach, looking instead for ways in which their actions or involvement can become the piece, collecting the smallest moments and elevating then to a dramatic and fantastical scale. 

​

Our large scale projection artworks centre upon a deconstruction of video as screen and narrative, exploring the potentials of whole building time-based work to interact with viewers en mass, morphing and reclaiming urban and rural spaces. By using light, sound and projection the actions of collaborators can be fused together to bring a space to life, and to allow audiences to view it in a new light. Multi-screen imagery matched directly to architectural features and composed soundscapes allows us to build large scale dramatic works from small beginnings, fusing actions and movement together into visual and aural filmworks that are full of excitement and wonder. 

​

Whilst our work incorporates new digital media and complex equipment, we are interested in combining these new technologies with notions of the curio, the Victorian penny machines or Edwardian Automata, visual wonders and spectacles that amused, engaged and intrigued. Recent works such as Illuminating Shakespeare, (Stratford) Jingwei and the Ocean (Liverpool) or Momentous (Leeds) seek to recreate and elevate this visual experience for the contemporary society through digital means. The sheer joy participants of The Penny Drops felt in dropping a coin in a slot, then seeing their coin bounce and fall down a huge building is a reaction we would always aim for in our work. 

​

We work internationally on high profile events, from Les Troyens for Lyric Opera, Chicago, US, to the 2017 Capital of Culture closing ceremony with Walk The Plank in Paphos, Cyprus, and creating a vast chocolate factory for City of the Unexpected  -the city wide centenary celebrations of Roald Dahl in Cardiff.

We seek to create work that is a representation of spaces, visual poems that coax the viewer into considering a place, playing with their expectations. Previous works where this can be seen include the massive Ar Waith ar Daith, transforming the Wales Millennium Centre, the five-building spectacular Light Fantastic, marking 100 years since the formation of Plymouth City, the transformation of the Rotunda into an interactive bookcase for Liverpool Library, or the spectacular 100 metre projection of hundreds of participants and their front doors on the Le Mans Crescent in Bolton (door to door).