ART BASEL AWARDS // Miami
The Vision
For the inaugural Art Basel Awards, we were brought in by Raygun as the lighting and visual content partner for the whole evening.
Set inside Frank Gehry’s New World Center on Miami Beach, the project carried the weight of a brand new awards franchise. The brief asked for a narrative of revelation, with one continuous design holding every space and every moment of the night. No precedent, no template. A first edition that had to feel like a tenth.
The Creation
The answer was a sunrise. A single arc moving from cool anticipation into warm radiance, carried across every space and every cue of the evening.
The building drove the rest. Gehry’s curves were read as sails, light becoming the wind moving across them, the architecture becoming the artwork rather than the host of one.
rapt designed the lighting, projection content and sound across the four chapters of the evening: arrival, ceremony, performance, afterparty. Each award had its own cue, lighting and projection moving together rather than apart. Pre-visualised before site. Content built in Notch. The whole show running as one integrated programme.
The Moment
The night moved as one continuous arc: cool anticipation through golden ceremony into the warm afterglow of the afterparty.
Awards landed with their own light, their own colour, their own beat. Gehry’s curves caught the changing tones of the evening, the building breathing with each cue. Where most awards shows feel stitched together from cues belonging to different teams, this one breathed as a single body. Behind every shift, rapt directed live alongside Raygun. A first edition, delivered like a tenth.
