From Firefly club nights to Light Night 2026: Architecture Social Club on returning to Notts

What can people expect if they go to see Parallels on Light Night?

Andrew: We say that it’s tectonic light. It’s creating mass out of light – big, volumetric, mesmerising, hypnotic, phenomenological, light experiences. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

Satyajit: We use the word ‘immersive’ quite carefully – but it’s immersive in terms of space. You’ll be expecting to see it stretch from one side of the square to the other. And collectively, it’s a really interesting experience to bask in that. We get people who, even in the winter, lie down on the floor to be under it. It has quite a transcendental effect

Tell me more about the process of making the installation. How did it start? 

Satyajit: We designed a technique which uses 3000 mirrors, and they all reflect back a single point laser in parallel. And we figured out a way to play film footage through lasers. So, if there’s some wind blowing you get volumes of smoke that capture part of the film, and holographic effects which are quite interesting. 

Andrew: What’s nice about Parallels is that it trades ‘potency’ for ‘fidelity’. So rather than being obsessed about 4k, 8k, or 16k screens, it’s actually not always completely legible what’s on the screen. It’s more about the intensity of the effect.

Satyajit: Yeah, the original version we made was for Miami – there was lots of concrete, and kind of no nature to be seen anywhere. One of the desires was to bring in nature, and we got some footage from nature, and pushed it through the system. So you’ll be able to ‘feel’ some of the content that comes through, but you don’t know exactly ‘what’ it is. You’re like, ‘Oh, that kind of feels like, say, leaves moving in the wind.’

Making creative and technical decisions in a project like this must overlap. How do you balance those two sides of what you do?

Satyajit: It helps if your teams aren’t isolated, so there is a dialogue going on between everyone. Most of the best ideas come from a collective conversation, as opposed to any one singular thought, or a person driving everything to a vision.

Andrew: That’s a nice summary. I would say that we’re quite interdisciplinary. We don’t just have an idea, sketch it out as a crude drawing, and then say, ‘here you go technical team, solve it.’ I don’t want to say there’s no distinction at the beginning of the process, but they’re both in the incubation process. 

Where else have you taken Parallels to and what have you taken from the audience reactions?

Satyajit: It’s been to a few different countries. It was in Mexico, the Netherlands – it gets around. It's interesting how each space is different. 

I also think there’s the cultural situation which changes how people behave with it. There’ll be some places where it’s appreciated more, based on what they already know – there’s a kind of music which they’ve come across before, or they’re used to having light festivals. That feels different to a city where they don’t normally have that kind of thing. And in a way I like both, because there’s something nice about approaching cities where they don’t have a big cultural program. 

Satyajit, you ran Nottingham’s Firefly club nights in the early to mid 2000s, mainly while you studied here. What are your best memories from back then?

Satyajit: Honestly, to say there’s too many would be an understatement. I did a lot of my growing up in Nottingham – that was the age between eighteen, and about 27. I was invested in the club culture, and obviously there was Firefly, but I was also Promotions Manager at a club called The Bomb – which was pre-Stealth. I learned about building big social structures around me.

I remember on my first week of being in Nottingham I went to a club night at the Marcus Garvey Centre. It was a techno night with, I think – Dave Angel – and they were announcing that this was the last ever night they would do there. We got obsessed with the idea that there’s no other techno night in the Marcus Garvey Centre. And in our naive way of thinking we were like, ‘let’s start doing some club nights,’ which set us off.

Parallels includes the music of artist Max Cooper, who you’ve worked with, Satyajit, since Firefly. What makes him a regular collaborator of Architecture Social Club? 

Satyajit: In many ways it’s quite comfortable because we’ve worked together since we were nineteen. But his music has also evolved to work really well with installations. There’s a cinematic quality that works really well – we’ve evolved together and are highly compatible with the vision of what we’re trying to achieve. What’s really important about these kinds of partnerships is that you’ve got a really healthy dialogue and there’s a lot of trust in the relationship – if something’s not right you can challenge it, and vice versa.

And Andrew, you’re from Nottingham. How does the Notts connection play into this project for both of you?

Andrew: It means a lot to do a project in Nottingham. One thing I always say is that we punch upwards, we don’t like being told what to do. I quite like that spirit that we have here. A lot of our industry is kept for a certain narrow strata of society, and being a working class kid from a council estate in Nottingham – the fact I’m doing something here shows you can transcend those barriers and dissolve them.

Satyajit: On a personal level, it feels like giving something back to somewhere that gave me a lot of nourishment. Over the past few years I haven’t been back to Nottingham as much as I used to, so the idea of coming back with a different hat to offer something positive is poetic – it feels very nice. 

Check out Parallels in Old Market Square during Nottingham Light Night, which takes place from dusk between Fri 6 - Sat 7 February. 

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