The Sunday Sermon – back to the Congregation

At 8pm, once it was deemed just dark enough KMA’s crane was once again raised and the installation’s generator was turned on. The square was sparsely populated as Bournemouth’s busy and sunny day had given way to an autumnal grey twilight. Something quite magical happened when Congregation started.

There were only around 30 people in the square but they all seemed to literally stop in their tracks and start to play.

I got a chance to speak with one of the operators and he was particularly impressed with the level of social interaction going on – people immediately seemed to ‘get it’ and that you could play with the light. Skateboarders who I’d met earlier in the day came down to see what the light would do when they wove through the square (the beams tracked the people moving quickly, but not the boards), a wheelchair user traced the outline of a giant circle and a circular beam of light tracked his journey full circle. Some people had returned to the piece having experienced it a previous night – “I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head.”

As we were stewarding for the evening we had the opportunity to talk to quite a few people who just wanted to know what was going on – people were saying “it’s the best thing I’ve seen in ages”, others wanted to know how it worked, another couple who looked to be in their late 70s stopped and stared before succumbing and leaping into the light themselves. University students promised to try to get friends down to flashmob the site, another simply wished “Bournemouth could always be like this.” For most of the afternoon we’d been stewarding near a couple who were going onto the homeless shelter later that night, one of whom said “Bournemouth can be such a cold hard place, and look at it now, it’s warm, people are all smiling at each other, this is amazing, I love it.”