Opportunity
The Fred Hollows Foundation had the opportunity to pitch an idea for an art installation to Vivid Sydney, but needed a winning idea. The opportunity was huge as it provided the foundation the chance to engage a younger audience and create social media content.
Core Idea
The concept needed to satisfy the primary criteria of being a magical art installation that would entertain visitors to the world’s largest festival of light, music and ideas. However, it also needed to communicate what the foundation does, without being dry or educational.
Our idea was to create an invisible art show, ‘The Gift of Sight’ – a first for Vivid Sydney.
We commissioned 20 of Australia’s best street and graphic artists to create original artworks using only special UV inks. The artworks lined the dark interior of a specially adapted shipping container, located at Darling Harbour.
On entering the container, each visitor was given a special UV flashlight and used it to reveal the invisible artworks as they walked through. The art literally shone out of the blackness in vivid glowing colours – a powerful analogy of the foundation’s work in restoring sight to the needlessly blind.
Results
The ‘Gift of Sight’ installation had over 1,500 visitors through it in just the first three hours on the opening night of Vivid Sydney. Across the two weeks of the festival the installation had over 47,500 through it. It generated a huge spike in social media video and photography sharing, achieving its objective of raising awareness of the foundation to a younger audience.