From Solstice in Montréal and Chicago to As Water Falls in the UK, Iregular’s practice highlights how festivals and large-scale events are reshaping conversations around technology, community, and public space.
Festivals have become important laboratories for experimentation in contemporary art in the public realm. By compressing time, concentrating audiences, and reimagining familiar sites at civic scale, they provide a platform where light, sound, and interactivity test new ways of experiencing place. Events such as Blink in Cincinnati or MAPP_MTL in Montréal have shown how projection mapping and multimedia installations can temporarily transform urban identity, expanding the possibilities for what art in public space can be.
Montréal-based studio Iregular has emerged as a key voice. Their works transform intangible systems—cosmic rhythms, neurological data, elemental forces—into participatory experiences. Technology, in their hands, is not simply a medium but an active collaborator, producing environments that shift perception and invite collective engagement.
Solstice exemplifies this approach. Presented at the Grand Quay of the Port of Montréal in 2023 and later at Navy Pier in Chicago, the installation enveloped audiences in an audiovisual environment evoking cycles of light and darkness. Visitors moved through a space that felt less like an exhibition than a shared seasonal ritual, reminding them of their connection to larger cosmic patterns.
As Water Falls, produced by Iregular for We Are The Fair on behalf of The Lexicon and Bracknell Forest Council in the UK, reimagines architecture as a responsive surface. A projection-mapped waterfall cascades across the building, its flow shifting in real time with the gestures and movements of participants. What begins as an evocation of natural force becomes an interactive dialogue between human presence and the built environment.
Other projects expand this inquiry: Mental Maps translates neurological activity into dynamic portraits; DICE investigates chance and order through generative systems; Nest creates a luminous architecture of shifting light. Together, these works demonstrate how Iregular continues to blur the line between viewer and participant, between physical space and digital field.
At CODAsummit 2025, Iregular will present as part of the Industry sessions on Thursday, September 25 at 1:15 pm. Their presence underscores how festivals and temporary works are not marginal but central to current discourse—catalysts for rethinking scale, authorship, and the role of the audience. For practitioners and commissioners alike, Iregular’s practice highlights the growing importance of planning for art as an event, not only as an object, and for experiences that leave lasting impressions long after the lights fade.
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