Sydney’s annual Vivid Light festival showcases the lighting, sound, and video work of artists from all over the world. Designers, programmers and architects come together to create art that is variously fascinating, challenging and occasionally perplexing.

In its fifth year, 2013’s Vivid Light featured 60 light installations and projections around Circular Quay, through the Rocks to Walsh Bay, in Darling Harbour and the Harbour Bridge itself. Here are some of my favourites from the festival:

Hundreds and Thousands from The Benevolent Society was a tunnel built from, er, hundreds of thousands of LEDs, reacting to the movement of the crowd with abstract colour washes.

In a similar, if more austere, vein, architects Jason Lu and Joseph Rowe’s Milkyway, made from dozens of suspended milk crates, welcomed visitors through an alleyway at The Rocks.

The Customs House was shaken, rattled and rolled by Danny Rose, whose interactive Move Your Building connected more extroverted members of the public with the geometry of the building as it reacted to their movements when they danced along to one of several selectable songs. Over-the-top animation blasted across the façade too, regardless of the dancers’ skills.

More installations dotted the waterfront, some withstanding the rigours of public exhibition better than others. A suspended morning star of road cones lit from within pulsed with light, presumably reacting to sound, although which sounds it was hard to tell. A beautifully constructed light mandala hung derelict from an overpass. And the light-and-water-show Aquatique at Darling Harbour delivered a spectacle that was undeniably huge.

The Sydney Opera House was the centrepiece of Vivid and this year sported eye-popping carnival visuals by Australia’s The Spinifex Group. The main animation sequence transformed the sails of the structure into a pinball machine and a bowling alley.

For more on Vivid Sydney, click here.