Sydney's most popular festival celebrates 10 years in the spotlights

In its 10th year, Vivid is a 23 day-and-night festival and said to be by its organisers the biggest event on Sydney's cultural calendar, eclipsing even the Sydney Festival.

Owned, managed and produced by Destination NSW, the annual program of lights, music and ideas has been copied elsewhere in the world and is integral to the government agency's endeavours to sell Sydney and NSW to interstate and international tourists, most particularly from China, Singapore and New Zealand.

A modest 220,000 people visited Vivid in that first year. The NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said that in 2017 2.3 million people attended the festival, with overseas and interstate visitors injecting $143 million into the state's economy.

Every year it has grown and this year, the festival is back ''by popular demand'' at Customs House with a light mural that pays tribute to May Gibbs' Gumnut babies on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Snugglepot & Cuddlepie.

The venue, an instant family favourite since year three, had been left in a darkened state due to light rail construction. Walking the festival last year, Bastic detected disappointment. The public missed it, ''and they let us know it'','' he said.

Luna Park's iconic ferris wheel and the fun fair precinct will be lit for the first time following a refit and TAFE students will create a projection for Government House, which also makes its Vivid debut.

North coast artist Jonathan Zawada has been given the ''great honour'' of illuminating the shells of the Sydney Opera House, taking his love of nature, and particularly the unique and odd forms it takes in the Australian bush, as his inspiration.

The award-winning Zawada mapped the shells in three-dimensional form and then filled them in to create his ''kinetic digital sculptures'' that show hyperreal patterns and shapes as well as texture. Zawada's Metamathemagical uses neon colour and botanical images that morph into bold geometric designs.

The Royal Botanic Gardens will feature one of Vivid's highlights, Aqueous, a 20-metre square pad that works as a modern hopscotch and was brought from California's Burning Man festival. Other popular precincts including Taronga Zoo, Darling Harbour and Chatswood return this year.

The polymath director and marine explorer James Cameron will be in conversation with Adam Spencer and launch the Australian National Maritime Museum's new immersive exhibition exploring Cameron's deep-sea expeditions. Projected onto the rooftop of the museum will be Sir David Attenborough's Blue Planet II. At Barangaroo, a giant puppet operated by a team of performers will walk the waterfront.

Awash in colour on the outside, inside the Sydney Opera House will turn over its stages and rehearsal studios to the likes of Grammy Award-winning recording artist Solange, America's godfather of West Coast rap, Ice Cube, Mazzy Star and Neil Finn. St Vincent is to perform at Carriageworks

Creative director Ignatius Jones partly attributes the success of Vivid to the nexus the festival draws between art and technology and its public accessibility.

Balthasar Indermuehle with Made of This, a series of six abstract paintings he co-created for Vivid 2018.
Photo: Louise Kennerley

From the outset, Jones banned talk among the festival staff of ''art with a capital A''. He began with the festival in 2011 and has signed up for 2019.

''I didn't want to know anything about it, and I didn't think the public wanted to either,'' Jones said. ''It's the ivory tower speaking. Art is meant to be a form of communication, it's meant to make you laugh or cry, and so much of it doesn't. What we've done is take the art off the wall and onto the streets where people can touch it.''

Jones and Bastic received as many as 400 expressions of interest to participate in this year's Vivid festival, many of them from students and many of them innovative. Being open to new ideas was the secret to keeping the festival fresh, Jones said.

One of those submissions came from the architectural firm Weston Williamson, responsible for some artistic installations at London's Paddington Station and Hungerford Bridge and currently working on a large infrastructure project for Sydney Metro.

Midnight Sun is a flame-coloured disc covered in smaller coloured discs which when lit creates a golden shimmer and is headed for the Royal Botanic Gardens.

For more information on the program go to www.vividsydney.com