This year, DIY Blinds was commissioned to install its products for a brand new venue at Melbourne’s iconic White Night.

Venue designer David Murphy contacted our team with a rather unique request: to create and fit a giant glass cube with custom-designed, multi-functional blinds.

If you had a chance to relish the delights of this year’s White Night, you may have come across The CUBE standing in prime location at QV Square. Physical theatre company Born in a Taxi used the space to perform Enlighten, a celestial-tinted piece that combined three-dimensional movements with two-dimensional light shows.

To achieve the effects envisioned by this team of creatives, some innovative engineering was required. This is where our team stepped in, ultimately turning blinds into a striking performance piece.

How the humble blind took the venue to another level

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The vision of the space was to create a demountable venue that could be used to display a wide variety of art projects. Essentially, it was to be a multi-purpose space for theatre, music, projection and video work. This meant that at times, the cube needed to be see-through; at others, it needed to have a filmy surface.

As such, David came up with idea of installing blinds that could act as screens switching between total opaqueness to total transparency.

The ‘magic’ of sunscreen blinds

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David initially got in touch with our team and we took him on a tour of the factory. Given that the blinds needed to function in such a refined way, we helped David work out the technical specs to come up with a savvy solution to cater for this.

We decided on utilising sunscreen blinds in the One Screen range. This was the ideal fabric to achieve the right visual effects: the material is designed to maintain clear views while also reflecting glare. Thus, it works in such a way that if there is a stronger source of light on the outside (i.e. a light projector), the blinds provide a canvas for this light to spill upon without penetrating the interior space. However, if the source of light comes from inside the space, the material then appears transparent from the outside, enabling onlookers to see in.

This meant that sunscreen blinds gave David the ability to control the projection, making the cube appear either opaque or transparent accordingly.

The final product?

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Once we had refined the solution, our team got to work manufacturing the blinds at our Melbourne factory. Within two days, the product was finished, ready to be delivered to David. We constructed the blinds in such a way that they were motorised and could be controlled remotely, enabling David to take full reins of the space.

The result was a successfully titillating performance for 2017 White Night patrons. Audiences were treated to a visual journey that skittled between dizzying light shows displayed on the cube’s surface, to enchanting theatrical performances taking place inside the space.

Thanks David and the team for choosing DIY Blinds for this unique project!