//exhibition_2023
Role(s): Lighting designer (all three years); co-design and build of the museum's interactive media lab; interaction & showcontrol (shared with AV team)
Setting: National Museum of Denmark's annual Christmas exhibition; same four-room space across the series, with sets and infrastructure reused and modified to fit each year's theme
Main hall lighting:
2024: moving heads, Pharos controls
2025: networked Twinkly Plus smart-LED strings integrated into the traditional Christmas mobile (juleuro), alongside moving heads
Media Lab (from 2024): co-designed and built; integrated into the exhibition
Control room: QLab show control combining Art-Net, DMX, and DALI (e:cue) lighting with multichannel Dante audio (RME Digiface), networked BrightSign players, and Nexmosphere sensors and controllers (QLab ↔ UDP ↔ BrightSign ↔ Nexmosphere)
Immersive prototype room: 360° projection from 5× Panasonic CMZ and 1× Panasonic VMZ, DMX lighting, multichannel Dante audio on Genelec speakers
Pilot project (2024): Time-travel escape room developed with a social urban modelling research group, in the space later used for the Media Lab. Designed lighting, interaction & show control shared with the AV team.
Workflow: Networked controls extended across all four exhibition rooms over the series; existing DALI infrastructure combined with Art-Net and Casambi; show control shared via QLab Remote; remote maintenance.
On display: November–January, three Christmas seasons
Credits:
Mette Boritz — curator (2023)
Johanne Steenstrup — curator (2024)
Anne-Mette Marchen Andersen — curator (2025)
Signe Beckmann Baird — exhibition architect (all three years)
Mikkel Heller/SUMO - curator, media lab pilot project (2024)
Overview
A recurring special exhibition series at the National Museum of Denmark — a new Christmas exhibition each November, with a different theme each year, built in the same four-room space and reusing or modifying the previous year's sets and infrastructure. I was lighting designer across all three editions and co-designed and built the museum's interactive Media Lab, integrated into the exhibition from 2025.
Reworking the same space each year shaped the approach. Sets, fixtures, and control systems were reused where possible and upgraded where each theme called for it — a sustainability angle on one hand, and a way to refine the lighting and AV workflow on the other. The networked control system grew with the series, extending the museum's existing DALI infrastructure with Art-Net and Casambi, and spreading over time to all four exhibition rooms.
The Media Lab
In 2025 the museum's interactive Media Lab was integrated into the Christmas exhibition. I co-designed and built it. The control room runs QLab as the central show-control layer, combining Art-Net, DMX, and DALI (e:cue) lighting with multichannel Dante audio, networked BrightSign players, and Nexmosphere sensors — chained as QLab ↔ UDP ↔ BrightSign ↔ Nexmosphere. An adjacent immersive prototype room has 360° projection from six Panasonic projectors, truss-mounted DMX lighting, and multichannel Dante audio on Genelec speakers.
Beyond this exhibition, the lab serves as the technical blueprint for the museum's wider AV and lighting workflow: a standardized toolkit, operation divided cleanly via QLab Remote, and remote maintenance built in from the start. A pilot project the year before tested the model — a time-travel escape room developed with a social urban modelling research group in 2024, in the same space. I designed the lighting; interaction and show control were shared with the AV team.
Lighting and interaction
Across the series, display-case lighting was calculated and tuned in dialogue with the conservation team for light-sensitive artefacts, and signage used custom lightweight backlit panels (Casambi). For the sets I built interactive torches and a bonfire driven by Nexmosphere LIDAR and PR sensors, routed through QLab and Art-Net into networked Twinkly Plus LEDs. Backlit printed banners (Art-Net) carried projection-mapped animations (MadMapper + BrightSign), and an interactive advent calendar used custom LED integration (Art-Net) with Nexmosphere triggers.
In the main hall, the museum's traditional Christmas mobile (julero) was lit with networked Twinkly Plus strings from 2025, alongside a moving-heads rig on Pharos in place from 2024. Show control and AV integration across the series were shared with the museum's AV team.