Today the tour is on foot through the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C. Rudi and I found ourselves with a free evening, so we headed out to check out this year’s Georgetown Glow light installation.

This nighttime extravaganza of light, video, color, and interactivity is in its eighth year, and while this year covered less ground than some previous years, it was still lots of fun with five pieces around the waterfront and shopping district of the neighborhood.

First up on M Street was “Light Falls” by Leandro Mendes-Vigas, a light and sound installation designed to recall Mendes-Vigas’ Brazilian Amazon rainforest and cleverly concocted out of two stories’ worth of duct hoses:

Threading our way past construction, rowdy students taking a break from finals, and closed storefronts, Rudi and I headed toward the river. At the entrance to Washington Harbor, we found our first interactive display with “Picto Sender Machine,” by Felipe Prado:

At first, it just looks like a color-changing display of screens, which would have been fun enough on its own. But then you read the sign and realize that you can do this with it:

After playing for a bit, we walked along the Potomac over to where the fountain is during the summer to get to our third installation, Alicia Eggert’s “All the Light You See”:

We head up Wisconsin Avenue to the Episcopalian Church, where we found a yard of butterflies:

Masamichi Shimada’s “Butterfly Effect” is probably the most subtle of the light displays, with the various panels on the butterfly wings shifting through bluish-purply hues over time, but it was very pretty.

Rather than stay on the street to get to the final Georgetown Glow installation, we crossed the bridge by Georgetown Park (kind of a weird mall-ish space, but also the spot where Andre Agassi literally ran into my mother) and their light display:

On the other side of the mall, we reached the final installation, another fun interactive one:

Cloud swings! The one I opted to grab wasn’t working properly, but if you swung on the other two, they changed from white to varying colors and brightness depending on how fast and hard you moved. “The Cloud Swing” was created by Lindsay Glatz and Curious Form.

Thanks for coming along with us on our tour of Georgetown Glow!