With just a matter of weeks to go until the 2022 edition of Illuminate Adelaide kicks off, it’s time to start planning how to spend your month of July in the City of Churches.

Returning for another stunning year, Illuminate Adelaide works under one simple premise: to shine a light on the city of Adelaide via a month-long celebration of art, light, sound, and imagination.

As you might expect, it’s already boasting a pretty impressive lineup of events (including a headline performance from a little-known band called Gorillaz), but what are the notable entries on the schedule worthy of writing home about? What are the greatest hits of this year’s festivities?

Well, with Illuminate Adelaide set to kick off in just under a month, we’ve decided to take a well-deserved look at the lineup to let you know what our picks for this year’s edition of the festival are.

Check out Ouchhh Studio’s Wisdom Of AI Light:

YouTube VideoPlay

Ouchhh Studio | Wisdom Of AI Light

Offering attendees the chance to lose themselves in an “AI driven multisensory experience”, Ouchhh Studio’s Wisdom Of AI Light uses the aforementioned artificial intelligence to create digital artworks out of complex data sets.

Just what does that mean exactly? Well, in short, it puts the ‘art’ in artificial intelligence by presenting breathtaking visual artworks that analyse the likes of 23,000 renaissance paintings, 20 million words by Einstein & Galileo, Mesopotamian dig sites, NASA’s Kepler telescope, and CERN’s Hadron Collider to create something truly unique.

Set to an immersive soundtrack by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, it all comes together to provide an experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen –or heard – before.

Love Live Music?

Get the latest Live Music news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more

Image of Unsound Adelaide
Unsound Adelaide takes over the Dom Polski Centre this July.

Unsound Adelaide & Unsound Club

Curated by the likes of Mat Schulz and Gosia Płysa, Unsound Adelaide and the Unsound Club are set to work in unison to provide music-lovers with eclectic tastes the musical escape they’ve long desired. Bringing Poland’s long-running Unsound festival to the southern hemisphere for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, Unsound Adelaide features iconic names such as MY DISCO, Marina Herlop, HTRK, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley on the live stage, putting Adelaide on the cutting edge of experimental music once again.

After hours though, the Unsound Club kicks into gear. Running until the break of dawn the next morning, the party keeps going with a special select offering of underground DJs and electronic artists from around the globe.

Boasting the likes of Air Max ’96, DJ Haram, TSVI, Emily Glass, and Corin, to name a few, the Unsound Club aims to be as eclectic as it is unexpected, with a focus that ensures that the forward-thinking of creatives of Adelaide are undoubtedly catered for.

Check out MY DISCO’s ‘StVO’:

YouTube VideoPlay

Light Cycles

Having blown away all in attendance at last year’s Illuminate Adelaide, Montreal studio Moment Factory are bringing Light Cycles back again, transforming the luscious greenery of the Adelaide Botanic Garden into an after-dark immersive experience connecting guests to the natural world like never before.

Utilising a cutting edge use of light, lasers, projection, and a moving original soundtrack, Light Cycles sees Moment Factory’s eclectic production delivering a stunning blend of technical innovation and natural splendour as it crafts unforgettable moments – from an ode to the setting sun in a tree-lined avenue to a spectacle of story and song in the garden’s Palm House.

Needless to say, following its sold-out season in 2021, the encore season of Light Cycles in 2022 is on track to be one of the hottest tickets at this year’s festivities.

Check out Light Cycles:

YouTube VideoPlay

City Lights

It’s hard to go past the visual centrepiece of Illuminate Adelaide, with the city-wide event returning in July to provide a new series of immersive installations, artworks and large-scale activations set to turn Adelaide’s most iconic streetscapes into a night-time playground of colour and sound.

Featuring boundary-pushing local and international artists, City Lights sees the North, East, and West precincts of the city transformed into mesmerising visual extravaganzas, inviting everyone to see Adelaide in a whole new… light.

Check out Illuminate Adelaide’s City Lights 2021:

YouTube VideoPlay

Illuminate Adelaide

Saturday, July 16th – Sunday, July 31st
Adelaide, South Australia
More Info: Illuminate Adelaide

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine