Electric Zoo

Electric Zoo Festival is one of New York City’s largest music festivals and features the top names in electronic music. Bringing a wide variety of acts from around the world since 2009. International editions have taken place in Mexico City, Tokyo, Shanghai and soon in São Paolo.

The Art of Light became familiar with Electric Zoo while touring with DJ’s Hardwell and Armin van Buuren. A couple of years later they came back to the festival and got to do light design and operating for nearly all stages. Working together with 250K and creative director Jeff Wright, The Art of Light was involved in the NY editions of 2015, 2016 and 2017. All lighting designs, for the last three editions, where created by André Beekmans. Who also did operating, together with Marco de Klerk and Koen van Elderen.

A UNIQUE CITY ZOO

Like the name already suggests, the festival concept combines the vivacity of wild animals and an animated city. In this case, the Big Apple. The phenomenal stages in the form of animals with Manhattan in the background transform the festival into a unique city zoo each year. “Our focus is on enhancing the incredible stages and their vibe with our lighting,” André Beekmans says, “for the edition of 2017 we used the Robe BMFL Blade spots for a high light output spotlight, the Martin Sceptron LED-strips to give the faux skyline a clean look and the Clay Paky Sharpy’s for beams to visually amplify the elephant ears.” The overall look and feel of the festival and its stages are impressive, but lighting completes the experience. “Even though we mainly focused on the decor, it’s really important to create a great balance between decor- and showlighting. The Philips Vari*lite 3515 definitely did the trick.” André adds.

The Art of Light wasn’t only responsible for the lighting designs, they also got to show off their skills while operating. Electric Zoo NY consists out of several stages with different kind of electronic music. For the mainstage the Art of Light used a pre-viz with WYSIWYG software, allowing the lighting operators to program backstage during the show. “Efficiency is key when it comes to big projects like this, including several designs.” André says.

The smaller stage Riverside had a different theme every day and the Art of Light managed to match the lighting with every music style seamlessly. For controlling the lighting and video content they used Green Hippo's Hippotizer.