The Lumen Lottery Award

There was only one prize. A book.

On 7 October 2026, at leatcon in Hamburg, a signed book changed hands, and for a moment an entire world of imagery was up for debate. The prize-giving of the ZNL Lumen Lottery was a small ceremony. The question behind it is bigger, and it does not belong to event technology alone: how much material effort do we now take for granted when we watch a big television evening?

We were looking for a single number, the total luminous flux of the lighting rig at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in Vienna. Estimates were made in advance, without equipment lists and without technical documents. What was needed was experience, imagination and a feel for orders of magnitude. Most guesses missed that order of magnitude by a wide margin. We say this without mockery, because the task was a mean one.

Mareike Eid of watershow.de guessed 68 million lumens. Our later calculation, based on the equipment lists that became known, put the installed total at around 67.8 million. That is a deviation of about 0.3 per cent. Anyone who takes that for coincidence is welcome to do so. We congratulate her anyway, and wholeheartedly.

The prize was a book from Ralph Larmann’s Stage Design series. Larmann, who has just published a new book, “Faszination Licht”, came to Hamburg in person and handed over the copy with his signature. A book about designed stage worlds as the prize for the most accurate sense of their cost: we could not have planned it better.

Why we let people guess

The Lumen Lottery was always more than a guessing game. It was meant to make visible something that disappears in the finished picture. We see faces, colours, beams and spaces that open and close. We do not see the fixtures, loads, cables and lorries that make these pictures possible. And it seems that even professionals can hardly estimate this effort any more.

This is not due to a lack of skill. It is because the number is written down nowhere. Reports on big shows name fixture types, quantities and names. They rarely say what electrical power, what weight and what transport volumes are attached to them. This is not a conspiracy but a habit. Yet habits determine what we consider normal.

The position of the ZentrumNeueLichtkultur is therefore simple: anyone who wants to judge the environmental impact of a production must also look at how it is built, not only at its effect on the screen. This is not an attack on the art. It is an invitation to take the material seriously as part of the design.

What the number says and what it does not

Light is an artistic means of expression like sound, space or movement. It can lift a person out of the crowd, open up a space or make it vanish. It creates closeness, overwhelm, artificiality and intimacy. At the ESC it tells the story of every performance. The question of its cost therefore touches the self-understanding of design: how do we recognise quality? And by what do we measure progress?

The 67.8 million lumens do not answer these questions, and they are not meant to. They describe what all installed light sources could together emit at most, according to the manufacturers, measured at the light source itself, before optics, colour filters and dimming take anything away. This is a capacity, comparable to the number of seats in a hall: it says what would be possible, not what was actually used on an evening. How bright the show looked on television or how well a picture worked cannot be read from it. What arrives on a face depends on beam angle, distance and colour, and is measured in lux, not in lumens.

Nevertheless this capacity has weight, and in the literal sense. By our count the Vienna rig comprised around 2,200 fixtures with an average of around 30,000 lumens each. Every one of them was manufactured, transported, hung, cabled and supplied with power. Lumens are not a measure of the ecological footprint. But they are a good occasion to ask about the dimension of the whole system.

Two answers to one question

Tim Routledge, who designed the lighting for the ESC 2026, was also at leatcon. Before his talk we spoke with him about the environmental certification of the ESC and in particular about the lighting. At his request we told him in advance the question we intended to ask publicly later.

In private conversation he expressed himself, as we perceived it, critically about the fact that the lighting rig too was covered by the Green Label. In the public Q&A he set a different emphasis: on the amount of light the cameras actually need, that is, on the effect in the picture. The total installed capacity and the infrastructure behind it remained in the background.

This is our subjective recollection of two conversational situations. There is no recording, so we do not quote verbatim. Mr Routledge was not consulted for this text, and we infer neither an intention nor an attitude from the difference in emphasis. A conversation in private and a stage with a microphone follow their own rules. Anyone who knows both knows that.

The difference is nonetheless revealing, because it leads to the core of this text. For the camera, what counts is what arrives at the subject. For the question of resources, what counts is what stands ready for it. An answer about the light at the subject can be right in terms of design and still leave open the question of the size of the rig. This is exactly where the concept we care about comes in: sufficiency. It does not ask how efficient a means is, but what measure is appropriate to a task.

What the power figures tell us

We asked ORF about the power supply and received an answer. The technical supply for the production in the Wiener Stadthalle was designed for 3 megavolt-amperes. What was actually drawn for the show hall was around 2 megavolt-amperes, for all system-critical consumers across all departments, not only for lighting. The television area outside the hall, the so-called TV compound, is not included.

Alongside it stands our own calculation: the lighting fixtures together have a connected load of around 1.8 megawatts, that is, the sum of the maximum power they can draw according to their manufacturers. The two figures are close to each other, and that is exactly why caution is needed. Megawatts and megavolt-amperes are different electrical quantities. A connected load is a theoretical upper limit, whereas the drawn value applies to the whole hall. We expressly do not conclude that the lighting claimed almost the entire power of the hall.

Above all, none of these figures says how much energy was actually consumed across rehearsals and shows. That would require measured kilowatt hours. We are not aware of any such measurements so far. That too is part of the finding.

A major event needs reserves. It has to function even when loads fluctuate or something fails. Nobody plans a power supply rigidly according to the sum of all maximum values, but nor according to the dimmed moment in which the picture is created. Cables, distribution and rigging are provided for the entire installation, even if not every fixture is running at full power all the time.

Ever brighter, only to be dimmed again?

The lighting industry loves its flagships. Every year a new fixture arrives, brighter still, often larger, more versatile still. At trade shows people gather in front of them, and rightly so: these fixtures show what is technically possible, and they are beautiful when they send their beams into the haze.

The ESC, however, is above all a television production. The audience in the hall matters, but the great majority watch the show through cameras. And in front of the camera, light often has to be turned down so that faces keep their definition, contrasts are right and backgrounds do not burn out. This gives rise to our pointed question: do we build ever brighter systems only to turn them down again for the camera?

As a verdict on a specific rig, that sentence would be too simple. There are good reasons for reserves. Saturated colours, such as a deep blue, leave only a fraction of the white light. Camera sensors see colours differently from the human eye, whose sensitivity is the basis for lumens. Large luminous LED walls call for light that can hold its own against them. And a shared system has to leave room for the very different ideas of more than thirty delegations. Moreover, dimmed does not mean inefficient with modern LED fixtures: less light also means less power. In Vienna, cinema camera systems were also used for the first time. What influence that had on the need for light, we cannot judge from the outside.

As the starting point of a debate about design, the sentence still holds. For one limitation remains: dimming saves power, but not material. The fixture with its power supply, fans, heat sink, optics and housing has long since been built. It weighs what it weighs, whether it runs at full power or at a fifth. In Vienna, fixtures hung from winches above the main stage, a lift raised lighting and laser fixtures up to eight metres, and several truss rings spanned the auditorium. That is magnificently conceived. But it is also very heavy.

How large the environmental impact was cannot be calculated from lumens alone; lifespan, reuse and transport routes also play a part. That is precisely why pointing to economical operation is not enough. We also need to ask whether smaller or more carefully chosen fixtures could achieve the same visual effect. For television, colour rendering, flicker-free operation and fine controllability often count for more than the last thousand lumens. Studio fixtures for this exist. Fixtures built for a television show of this size that deliberately forgo maximum output are rarely seen at trade shows. We ask the manufacturers with respect: is that due to a lack of demand, or because nobody has formulated it?

Liverpool as a counter-question

A comparison leads back to Mr Routledge himself. We consider his lighting design for the ESC 2023 in Liverpool outstanding. By our calculation it managed with around 27.5 million lumens. In Malmö 2024 it was around 41.1 million, in Basel 2025 around 63.6 million and in Vienna 2026 around 67.8 million. Within three years the installed capacity has thus grown to roughly two and a half times.

This does not prove that half of it could easily have been left out in Vienna. Halls, stage sets, LED surfaces and camera systems differ. And more installed lumens do not automatically mean a brighter picture. Even if the entire additional output showed up in the picture, which it does not, it would amount to just over one stop for the camera. But the comparison poses a counter-question to the idea that convincing pictures inevitably require ever larger rigs. If a very good picture was possible with far less material, “we simply need more” is in any case no law of nature.

The real question is therefore: what has grown between Liverpool and Vienna? The design task, the number of possibilities or the expectation of the event? Our summer essay “Efficiency, Sufficiency and the Expansion of the Necessary” traces this shift. Its core fits into one sentence: a technical dimension, once reached, easily becomes the silent starting point of the next production.

Who decides what is necessary?

Anyone who works in theatre, opera, dance or at festivals knows this: what stands on a stage is rarely the decision of a single person. Equipment lists too emerge in a web of relationships. Lighting design, production management and technical service providers bring in their requirements. Stock, budgets, contracts and supply chains shape the selection. Manufacturers’ interests and the wish for a spectacular reference could play a part, as could the unwritten law that a host does not want to undercut its predecessor. What of this was decisive at the ESC, we do not know. We do not claim any dependencies. We ask where in the system the measure is decided and whether the designers are as free in this as we assume.

Perhaps this is even good news for them. If designers do not alone decide on the dimension of the rig, responsibility lies where it can be discussed: in the system.

One building block of this system is pre-programming. Lighting sequences today emerge at every level of the industry first on a virtual stage, long before the real rig stands. The Vienna show, too, was pre-programmed in a studio. The tool is valuable. But in the model no fixture weighs anything, it needs no truss and no lorry. The hundredth fixture costs a mouse click there. That does not mean planners ignore the consequences. It means that making these consequences visible in the design is a task in its own right. Why should planning software not show weight, connected load and transport volume alongside the picture?

And then there is training. In many arts, leaving things out counts as mastery: the pause in music, the gap in a text, the empty space in theatre. Where in lighting design is it taught to carry a picture with darkness, contrast and a single precisely placed light source? We know of no training so far that expressly teaches sufficiency as a design skill, and we would welcome pointers. Until then, newcomers learn from the great references, and the greatest references are those with the most fixtures.

When every line of sight becomes a stage

Over decades the ESC has developed from a song contest into a multi-layered television production. Its pictures are part of its magic. Movement, luminous surfaces and changing perspectives allow every entry a world of its own. We love that. We assess neither the music nor the achievements of the artists, and we do not want to take anything away from this diversity.

But new pictorial possibilities change the task. In Vienna the camera drew stage and audience in from numerous all-round perspectives. Truss rings above the auditorium and lighting around the Green Room turned the whole hall into the picture. Wherever the camera looks, a new background arises, and it has to be designed.

This produces a feedback loop: technology opens up new pictorial spaces, whose equipment demands further technology. What one edition introduces as an extension counts as the baseline for the next. What is technically feasible slips unnoticed into what is necessary. This needs no decision and no culprit. It is enough that nobody asks.

This is exactly where the question of resources becomes a question of culture. What idea of the great event do we cultivate? Must every edition capture more space and fill it more densely than the last? What freedom do designers have to leave a moment empty? A single face in a dark room can carry an entire evening. Whether it does so is decided by the staging, not by the number of fixtures.

It is not the diversity that is up for discussion, but the technical effort we now consider necessary to bring it about.

A proposal for Burgas

The ESC 2027 will take place in Burgas. Our hope is addressed to Bulgarian National Television and all those involved, and it is not a demand: please do not classify the lighting rig as “green” merely because modern LED or laser technology is used.

Efficiency asks how much light you get from a watt. Sufficiency asks how many watts a task needs in the first place. The Austrian Ecolabel for Green Producing, with which the Vienna ESC was also awarded, answers mainly the first question for lighting in the version available to us: at least 80 per cent of the light sources must be energy-saving. This criterion knows no upper limit for installed power or total consumption. A very large rig can therefore meet it just as well as a small one. We criticise this gap, not the people who worked and certified according to the rules in force. We cannot present a full environmental balance of the Vienna ESC. That is precisely why we wish that installed power, measured energy, material and transport become visible in future.

As a stimulus for discussion, the ZNL proposes a limit with room to manoeuvre: up to 2,500 lighting fixtures, around 300 more than in Vienna, but with an average of no more than 10,000 lumens. Together that would be 25 million lumens, somewhat less than in Liverpool and a good third of the Vienna figure. Individual powerful fixtures would remain possible as long as the total adds up. More positions for the design, less capacity overall.

This proposal is not finished. What counts as one fixture, a pixel bar, an LED strip? Manufacturers’ figures are not always comparable. And more small fixtures can mean more cable, more assembly and more electrical base load. A lumen limit alone could therefore miss the goal. We propose combining it with a limit on the electrical connected load, taking weight into account and measuring actual energy consumption. Which values are appropriate and workable for design should be worked out together by designers, production and environmental experts. The proposal is meant to open this work, not to replace it.

The freedom not to do something

The small Hamburg prize-giving thus leads to a large question about the freedom of design. This freedom includes the decision to leave a technical possibility unused. That would be no sacrifice if it produced pictures that are just as strong and use fewer resources. It would be skill.

The ZentrumNeueLichtkultur makes its findings available on a non-profit basis, independently, without commercial interest and without any consulting offer attached. We want to make accessible figures that are otherwise written down nowhere, and to enable a debate that does justice to artistic achievement as much as to its material prerequisites. Mareike Eid’s remarkable guess has provided a fine occasion for it.

Our guiding principle remains:

We do not want less Eurovision. We want Eurovision with fewer resources.