Light designer Tim Hunt has been invited to create an installation for the 2013 Vivid Sydney winter festival.
''I'm still working on it at the moment,'' Mr Hunt said from Sydney yesterday. ''It's going to be activated, or triggered, by people interacting with it. It's a metaphor for communication and people talking. It's called Richochet, because it's about people richocheting ideas of each other, which is what the Vivid festival is all about.''
The 14m long installation includes 24 lasers controlled by four sensors, a soundscape and a smoke machine.
It will be sited in the 1.2m wide Suez Canal alley, beside the Museum Of Contemporary Arts in the Rocks area, near Circular Quay.
''It's a really site-specific festival. I've got a fascination with giving people a bigger experience than just lights. I want to immerse, or entrap, them in it. Like a laser web.
''It's an exciting time to be doing this sort of work, with the advent of leds in the mainstream commercial world. Things you couldn't do a couple of years ago you can do now. You've got all these manufacturers doing very different things, because they don't know what's going to happen, either.''
The outdoor winter festival fuses immersive light installations and projections, water fountains, music performances and multimedia interactive light sculptures and building projections on to buildings and landmarks in the Sydney CBD and Sydney Harbour.
''It's a great opportunity to show off the lighting design profession to the public and to get to work on art-based, small-scale lighting installations,'' Mr Hunt said.
''The idea is to get people out in winter and into the city. The city is dead in winter, so it's a great community thing, because it brings in heaps of tourists.''
More than 500,000 people attend the annual outdoor exhibition and events.
''It would be a really exciting thing to do in Dunedin, because there's so much architecture there you could highlight. The council building, First Church ... there are a lot of buildings you could light up really well in Dunedin.''
Mr Hunt (28) was born and raised in Dunedin and completed a bachelor of design degree at Otago Polytechnic in 2007, before moving to Sydney to work as a lighting designer for engineering company Arup. He designs architectural lighting for boutique installations, theatre productions, large-scale commercial buildings and urban developments.
