CHAUVET Professional, ChamSys & Capture take center stage at the Borderline Festival 2026

The Borderline Festival 2026, the Onassis Foundation’s festival of contemporary and experimental music, concluded with resounding success, returning this year to the industrial space of Onassis Ready in Renti.

With an impressive combination of cutting-edge technology and artistic innovation, the festival raised the bar for production, utilizing some of the world’s most advanced lighting, control, and visualization systems from CHAUVET Professional, ChamSys & Capture.

For a festival with the unique character of Borderline, the demands for flexibility, intensity, and precision in lighting were high.

To bring this demanding visual design to life, equipment was used that meets the highest standards of international stages:

 24 x CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Bar 16 

 14 x CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Curve 12

 16 x CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M

 1 x ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium

 Capture 2025 Symphony Edition (Visualisation)

The team responsible for the project’s lighting design stated:

“The choice of equipment played a decisive role in shaping the image of the Borderline Festival 2026. Electronic music, pixels, and strobes go hand in hand. No one could fail to notice the three tiers with a total of 24 CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Bar 16s at the back of the stage.

Nor will anyone who attended forget the CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Curve 12 units, which were mounted in the center of the venue’s ceiling. The ability to control movement, color, brightness, and zoom for each individual pixel allowed us to create stunning effects that are practically impossible to achieve with other lighting fixtures.

The final visual effect was achieved using 16 CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M fixtures. The combination of intensity, color quality, and exceptional strobe effects is essential for this type of music festival.

When it came to control, the ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium took the reins. The 22 DMX Universes are more than enough for this particular console, and we didn’t even need to create a DMX patch. As soon as the final design was completed in Capture, it was automatically uploaded to the console via the network, making the creation of Group Grids a breeze.

The lighting effects on the Group Grids are particularly interesting. The goal is to avoid wasting time on programming, while still achieving immediate results. Pixel Mapping, Speed Masters, Group Grids, and Audio Input were the tools we used most frequently. Audio Input, in particular, played a very important role; we had set specific effects to be audio-reactive to specific audio frequencies, which was a complete success.

Everything was planned and tested in advance using Capture 2025 Symphony Edition. Today’s festivals require thorough preparation to achieve the desired result. You can’t be wondering during setup which direction to place the pixel lights or searching for free DMX channels for the DMX patch. All these issues must be resolved so that our time at the festival venue can be spent creatively.

All the planning was done in advance, creating a 3D model of the space using LiDAR. The process of creating a 3D model with a LiDAR camera and then basing all the rest of the work on it was particularly interesting. Based on this 3D model, the lighting design was created.

After that, all the lighting experiments, as well as the final planning, were carried out in Capture’s 3D environment. In Capture, you can catch errors and oversights early on. The realistic results produced by the software allow us to be certain in advance of how we want to light the scene, as well as which effects are effective for our needs. We exported some snapshots from Capture, which were incredibly interesting when we compared them to the actual final result at the end of the festival.” 

Project credits

Artistic Direction: Voltnoi & Quetempo (STEGI.RADIO Artistic Directors), Akis Chontasis

Lighting Design & Programming: Vangelis Mountrichas, Pavlos Pappas, Makis Anastasakis

Lighting Assistant: Emmanouela Krisilia

Lighting Crew - Coordinator: Georgia Tselepi

Photos by: Pavlos Mavridis

Προμηθευτής: UTG

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