Volt’s ‘Bright’ idea for Glastonbury Festival's Shangri-La

For the last six years, we’ve designed and built an audio-visual installation in Glastonbury’s most notorious late-night field: Shangri-La. This year the theme was ‘The Greed of the Corporation’ and we were asked to represent the ‘IT Department’.

We created a large LED and projection-based installation called the ‘Central Processing Unit’ which was aimed to create the experience of dancing inside a computer. The LED part was controlled through Madmappers Madlight, a program that sends DMX signals to, in our case, 12 x 27ch RGB DMX decoders, controlling over 50m of RGB LED strip with full-colour control from any video signal!  The projection part was based around 3 projectors running a super wide image, to create an immersive effect. This was controlled by Modul8 which enabled us to mix and control the video signals shown.

The accompanying sound system used our Radial drivers to provide high-quality sound over the 4 days. Which was just as well as a huge line array system from Shangri-La’s main Heaven Stage was firing straight at our smaller venue! We’re pleased to report that the Volt system held up extremely well. The mid/hi boxes were loaded with a 1” compression horn and Volt RV3813 (15”), the sub bass boxes were loaded with our RV4504 (18”).  We had two mid/hi boxes and a double 18” sub per side.

Over the course of the festival, the CPU provided a platform for many DJs, VJs and live acts and was packed every night. The Radial speakers also drew a fair amount of attention and we watched with amusement as party-goers tried to sit in the chassis for photos!

The CPU was unaffected by the electrical storm that lead to the temporary closure of the main stages on the Friday evening but we were not unaffected by the subsequent mud. If you’ve ever experienced the mud at Glastonbury, you will know it is unlike any other! The queue to enter the CPU lasted until the early hours of Sunday morning and lead to a strange wall of mud, about a foot high that built up against the door of the venue.  It was so solid it took six of us in steel boots to disperse it!

Hopefully, they’ll be more Radials and less mud at next year’s festival.