Well, I'm not a superstar, a rock star, or something like that

which you can think from the start.

This happens because I wanted to talk

about light and public space tonight.

I'm a curator of the lights festival

in Prague, Czech Republic.

But first of all, I wanted to show you this.

This is a light art piece.

It's an interactive light art piece by one of my friends

called INITI, and it's called "TOUCH-ME-NOT".

The name of the piece in Czech language

refers to a herb, a plant, which,

if you want to touch it, it explodes.

So you can't touch it without destroying it or changing it.

I'm showing this to you because it speaks about

the nature of light,

about those aesthetic qualities of light

which somehow inspires me

and somehow arouses my imagination.

This is like the pieces.

You can try to touch the light and react with it.

Sometimes the light creates an object,

but it's not something you can touch.

It's illusive.

But it's also very dynamic and it's very fluid.

On the other hand, it stands there.

It's constant. It's something like a river

which changes all the time, but it stays the same.

So these qualities of light

they make me think about it very much

when I was working in the theatre.

I think we can stop the fog now. Thank you very much.

Okay, let's forget about light

and get some slides now.

So my name is Jan Rolnik,

I'm about to talk about light festival

which we organized in the Czech Republic, Prague,

in this tiny country in the middle of Europe

which has no sea.

Well yeah, about the city.

It looks something like this

when you wake up very early

in the morning in winter.

You have a chance to see it like this.

It's a city full of history.

Some 700 years ago it was one of the three

most important cities of western civilization.

But it's a long time ago.

And now, all the streets and all the walls

are full of these old ghosts.

People say it's a magical city because

things to see there.

There are some crazy sorcerers who tried

to make gold out of coal, or

living beings out of clay.

So, it's kind of a magical city.

I'm talking about this because

it's a city which arouses imagination.

When you're walking through it,

or at least when I do,

it makes me daydream.

And it makes me think about what can be.

About the people who are also creating the city...

Some 25 years ago, we had something we called

Velvet Revolution. That was a revolution

without violence, and we got rid of

the totalitarian communist regime.

And we started with democracy and capitalism.

We were very happy at the time.

I was nine years old.

But after some time, there was also some dissolution.

Somehow people started to follow ideas of

individualism, competition, consumerism.

This lasted for some 20 years.

Why I am talking about it is that

I feel that something is changing,

that people somehow started to share

their lives and their experiences together

in the streets of their city.

This is, for example, some event

which is organized twice a year in our city.

It's actually not financed by the city or government.

It's just a celebration of a city when

every bookshop, every cafe, every bar

just does something for their neighbors.

They just show what they have from the store.

And people just stop using cars.

They walk on the streets, they use bikes.

It's just a celebration of the public space of the city.

It's every year... bigger and bigger.

For me, it's a sign of willingness to participate

on the public space of the city,

on the story of the city.

There is one very nice quote which

I will quote in full now,

which tells beautifully about what I mean

talking about public space here.

It says: "It's a multi-layered structure of city life

which facilitates meeting

evokes emotion and enjoyment of beauty.

It inspires and irritates senses.

It offers both historical and current reflection of society.

In this sense, it is a cultural space comparable

with theatre, museum, concert hall or

imaginative world of a novel or a movie."

This means that every one of us

can take part on the story of our city,

and may reshape it, may change the meaning of it,

change the meaning of the space.

I think you all know this very well,

here in Taiwan and in Taipei.

Because you get to know this.

One of these picture is 3 months old,

and one of them is 3 days old.

This is a way how to make public space a statement,

and to make light a way how to participate

in this space, in this story.

Well, I just want to somehow take my part here

and I want to express my thumbs up

and fingers crossed to occupy Hong Kong here.

And take part on this happening

which is so fresh in time.

But, in our Czech Republic,

we already did our fights.

We don't have much to fight against at this moment.

So we just play with the city.

I've been talking about light and public space

in the city. So what we did is

we took these two things we love:

the city and light, and technologies,

and we put some emotions and imagination

in between them.

This is what somehow describes our idea.

This was an invitation for a second edition

of our festival, which takes place two weeks from now.

And in the first edition,

we became very, very successful with the festival.

We created something like a labyrinth

which was full of surprises,

full of unexpected meetings of the third kind, sometimes.

We use the city as a canvas,

on which we and the artists we invited can paint

and can create something new.

We use the historical background of the city

which I was talking about

to do something spectacular,

to do something different.

So sometimes we put some contrasting stuff in it.

For example, this installation,

this large-scale installation,

was created by a French artist: 1024 architecture.

It was suppose to make people "unquiet".

You can visit this tentative installation

it just drew you away to different times and place.

I will give you this video with sounds

so that you can understand what I mean.

So this makes people, somehow, unsure of

what's behind another corner,

what can attack them,

what's happening in the city.

What was great about it is that

suddenly, they started to see the city in a different way.

Their eyes changed. They started to see

the buildings that were there

in another way, in a different way.

Well, we also try to offer them

some pleasant kind of experiences.

This is one of them. It's a piece called "Cloud".

It's by two Canadian artists:

Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett.

Amazing people.

What this piece does greatly is

it gets people together.

It's one of the pieces when

multiple interaction is possible.

This is really difficult because

there are just rain chains

and you can just come and pull it

and make a little thunder above your head.

And you can do this with 30 other people.

And suddenly, you start to compete

and you start to play with the others.

It's a very nice thing.

Well, so we created, I showed you,

two of these installations.

We had 35 of them.

In four days, we had a quarter million visitors

in the city which were all astonished

and they were sharing one experience

in the city at night. So, we succeeded.

One thing that I want to say here is that

we feel the responsibility for the public space.

We fight very strongly not to sell it out,

not to sell out the artist,

not to sell out the audiences to the companies

who want to advertise in the public space.

And this is also very important to think of

when you're trying to do a festival like that.

Well, these are the powers of light in public space.

I will just let you see the last video

which I love very strongly.

I saw it like 100 times.

Again, because it's simple.

It's just two elements: light and face.

For me, it's strongly emotional.

It arouses inspiration.

My message for this is just: be creative with light.

Play with light in public space.

That's all I have for you. Thank you.

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