Sydney’s next summer party season will ignite at Customs House, Circular Quay, on Thursday 3 September – with the launch event for SuperLux: Smart Light Cities, a major exhibition and book surveying global trends in urban arts at night.

Above: Hot Wheels Skull Racers, Customs House, (Mattel Australia promotion, 2011), by Muse Amsterdam and 2Fish Australia. Photo Peter Murphy.

Supported by convenors of the UN Year of Light 2015, the City of Sydney’s Art and About festival and media partner InDesign, the SuperLux exhibition will include three lightworks by guest artists Mary-Anne Kyriakou, Damian Gascoigne and Alan Rose; new illuminations of the Customs House facade and Sydney city model by architect Mike Day with his lighting design students from UTS, and video and photographic displays of recent Australian and international triumphs across various genres of light art, from writer Davina Jackson’s new SuperLux book (Thames & Hudson).

Yas Marina Island Hotel, by Asymptote Architects with Arup Lighting: colour-changing RGB LEDs stud the monocoque roofshell of the Formula One raceway and tourism centre in Abu Dhabi. Photo Bjorn Moerman.

Lightworks in Sydney by Bruce Ramus, Yann Kersalé, Barry Webb, Warren Langley, Brian Eno, McDermott Baxter, The Electric Canvas, Spinifex Group, Clouston Associates, Arup, Meinhardt, Fiona Venn and Reinhard Germer, Lend Lease, Fraser Properties-Sekisui House, Kyriakou and Joe Snell, Ingo Bracke, Jen Lewin, BIBI, Cornelia Erdmann and the Buchan Group are presented.

Crystallized by Andrew Daly and Katharine Fife: RGB LEDs create technicolour effects across a contoured screen of pixel tubes, mounted under Sydney’s Cahill Expressway for a Vivid festival.

SuperLux also highlights Customs House as Sydney’s favourite early colonial monument that is regularly transformed by 3D-mapped video projections, especially during the annual autumn Vivid festivals; and celebrates the 10th anniversary of the building’s 2005 reopening as Sydney’s first internet-era public information centre.

Aspire by Warren Langley: illuminated trees apparently support a motorway overpass at Pyrmont, Sydney. Photo Richard Glover.

Event details: SuperLux: Smart Light Cities launch, 6.30pm, Thursday 3 September, RSVP customshouse@cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au