Lighting up Edinburgh's History - Culture - Scotsman.com By TIM CORNWELL Published on Thursday 1 March 2012 00:00 Famous quotes from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers will light up Edinburgh tonight. And that's just one part of an ambitious new project celebrating the city's literary heritage, discovers Tim Cornwell School's polite shall lib'ral Arts display, And make auld barb'rous Darkness fly away. So wrote the poet Allan Ramsey, in lines said to capture the life ambition of his contemporary David Hume, the philosopher and famous early denizen of Edinburgh's New Town. Casting off the auld barb'rous darkness, today sees the start of an ambitious effort to celebrate Edinburgh's place as an Enlightment city of literature and scientific achievement. It will be hard to miss. For 18 days this month, in six sites across the New Town, "show-stopping" animated lighting projections will bring some of its greatest monuments and buildings to life, from St Andrew Square to Rose Street. The enLIGHTen project, running from tonight, has goals well beyond a lighting spectacular. Viewers can download a series of original short stories and essays on their MP3 players or smartphones, in what will become a night-time walking tour of discovery. The content ranges from the ghost of an old lover haunting the walls of the Roxburghe Hotel off Charlotte Square, though an encounter amid the tents of the Occupy Edinburgh protest in St Andrew Square, to brief histories tied to the New Town streets and squares and the great and good who lived there. In the words of Frankenstein author, Mary Shelley, who stayed in Frederick Street with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley: "The beauty and clarity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle and its environs, [is] the most delightful in the world." Hammering home that message, and in particular Edinburgh's many literary connections, enLIGHTen is the latest and probably boldest project from the Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature project. It is financed with £52,000 from Creative Scotland, but with other donations and in-kind support it reaches a cost closer to £100,000. The Royal Society of Edinburgh building on George Street will be bathed in what's being called a dynamic 3D projection. Northern Light, the Edinburgh-based sound, lighting, and technology firm, is using "architectural projection mapping" to work with the features on the building. "It will really play with existing lines and shapes, you can make it appear to morph and change textures," says Chris McNellis, project manager for NL Productions. Working with what's there, rather than with a square rectangular piece, we can fully sculpt with the projection and the image, so it sits quite naturally, or quite unnaturally, and really twists and changes the shape of things. Intriguing, to say the least. Down the road at Charlotte Square, we're promised 360 degree "spherical projection," two metres in diameter, while at St Andrew Square there's a moving projection system that will sweep images all the way up the column. Seeing is believing with light displays. Northern Light has worked with venues from the Royal Festival Hall in London to the Enchanted Forest, a night-time wooded walk at Pitlochry. Separately, the city of Durham is among those who have embraced light displays as tourist attractions as potential off-season tourist draws, with its Lumiere light festival in November. What makes Edinburgh different is to tie the lights to literary content. Free to download from the Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature Trust's website (www.cityofliterature.com/enlighten), or on the street via a smartphone, are short new writing works, mostly "site-specific micro-fiction," from six authors. Also downloadable are brief and simple histories of the sites and surrounding streets by David Hicks of Edinburgh World Heritage. The organisation beamed literary quotes onto major Edinburgh landmarks during the "Carry a Poem" reading campaign. This time the goal is an architectural and literary journey. My personal favourite among these downloads is Monuments of the Mind, by the poet William Letford, a winner of a New Writer's Award from the Scottish Book Trust. Written in response to the Melville Monument in St Andrew Square, and the words of David Hume, it is nonetheless a disarmingly simple description of two men, a father and grandfather, remembered through wreaths of smoke. "Well if that's the way it is then that's the way it is," it concludes, and whether or not this is a quote from Hume - which seems unlikely - or anyone else, it's a powerful, haunting piece of verse. It's always a pleasure to hear James Robertson. He's taking on the poet Robert Fergusson, revered by Robert Burns, reflecting on what might have happened if they'd met in Edinburgh, rather than Fergusson dying in despair and sickness aged 24. He reads Fergusson's Ode to the Gowdspink, deftly comparing the wild goldfinch's freedom to fly to the gilded cage of the captive bird. In another, the atmospheric short work Sleep Pictures by Kirsty Logan, a ghost haunts a former love in the rooms of "our hotel," watching them Google for spirits and spectres at their laptop. Starfield by Gavin Inglis also features a couple over a laptop, in a tent in the former Occupy camp in St Andrew Square. "Because of where it is, it will be for Edinburgh folk, the locals, but we would hope it will attract other visitors who will want to come and see it," says Ali Bowden, director of Unesco City of Literature. The massive "showstopping" projections are part of "tapping into the possibilities of using light as an attraction in the city in those dark, quieter months. We believe this is the first time this kind of technology has been used for cultural purposes. It's a Scottish first. For those a little less smart on their phones, maps and information, and the quotes, will be available at the projection sites. They have also been distributed across Edinburgh and beyond in print form. About the enLIGHTen project The enLIGHTen project has commissioned six new pieces of writing, in response to pithy quotes from writers and thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment period. Maxwell's Platter, by science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, imagines Adam Smith meeting other founders of the Royal Society in an unexpected afterlife. The Wisdom of Stone, by poet JL Williams, is inspired by geologist James Hutton. Sleep Pictures, by Kirsty Logan, is "a ghost story about loving and being loved." Starfield by Gavin Inglis is set among protest tents on St Andrew Square, and Monuments of the Mind is a poem by William Letford inspired by the words of Hume. Finally, James Robertson explores the legacy of poet Robert Fergusson. enLIGHTen runs from today until 18 March. Information and downloads at www.cityofliterature.com/enlighten.