Living lights video transcript

[Music playing]

Peter Ralph: Algae being at Vivid is a fantastic opportunity to have the first living organisms in a lights display.

Lochlan de Beyer: Vivid Festival is a festival of lights and colour, so we wanted to actually have three different colours of algae. Generally, we have three colours in the algal kingdom: brown algae, so your hetragontrafida; red algae, your rhodaphytes; and your green algae, so chloraphytes and the like.

Algae has the ability to produce 30-50 per cent of all the oxygen that we breathe in the world, and that’s why we’re really happy to bring this to the public – to raise the awareness of the fact that algae is such a major player in oxygen production.

Peter Ralph: Algae are single-celled organisms, and they can be used to produce raw materials for virtually any industry. We can replace petrochemicals, they suck C02 out of the atmosphere, and we can produce them in regional Australia, we can produce them in factories in the cities.

The future for algae research is massive. We want to see bio-economy established. Bio-economies around the globe is the future sustainable production sources, and Australia desperately needs to be at the forefront. We’ve got immense land we can use for this, we’ve got the right technology.

Jestin George: Biotechnology is definitely going to be a huge part of creating a more sustainable world. I think it’s actually the only way, because we can’t stop progress. We know that we need to start to do things in a much more sustainable way. Biotechnology is the solution for that, because we’re using nature and biology but in a systematic and technological way.

Peter Ralph: We’ve collected the experts from around the globe, whether or not they’re molecular engineers, they’re process food engineers, they’re chemists, we’ve got the greatest density of researchers in this space, and we can transform Australian industries.

Jestin George: I hope that people who have come to Vivid and see our installation suddenly realise this huge world of micro-algae, that it’s not just this passive part of nature. It can be a huge part of our future and sustainable solutions.