020 INTERVIEW
For a man who professes to be travelling the globe 40 weeks a year, “from the ass end of the world,” Cuono (Con) Biviano doesn’t look like he’s ever been smacked with so much as an hour’s worth of jet-lag. Based on Queensland’s exotic Gold Coast, the sharp-eyed, fastidiously attired and confidently articulate Australian has spent 21 years building something of a production empire. In the last five years his evolving company, Universal Lighting and Audio (ULA), has expanded out of Melbourne to provide a platform first for the creation of Anolis, his successful LED joint venture with Robe, and more recently the LED screen manufacturing start-up, VuePix. We are meeting in the press room at Frankfurt’s Prolight + Sound Show - but while I will be heading straight back to London afterwards, Con is merely passing through on his way to Bangkok (one suspects it would take more than a shower of volcanic ash to choke his momentum). With the VuePix manufacturing facility based in Shenzhen and his Anolis partners, Josef Valchar and Ladislav Petrek, HQ’d in Roznov - about as far East as the Czech Republic will allow - if you don’t envy his lifestyle at least envy his cache of air miles.
Let’s start with the basic maths. If ULA is celebrating its 21st anniversary this year and Con passed his own 40th birthday milestone a couple of months ago, that makes him some early starter. Yet by the age of 19 he was already an industry veteran. A paradigm of the link between old-school disco and the new wave of architectural arrivistes, his prescience enabled him to create the perfect storm, converging the key elements of LED (static solid state) with advanced digital signage (moving pixel canvases). After expanding rapidly through the boom years of 1990s nightclub and event technology, enabling ULA to set up turnkey production bases in three major cities (with the HQ relocated to Brisbane), when investment in articulated entertainment technology dried up Con Biviano was ready for an assault on the architectural world. It was hardly an epiphany - one senses it had already been factored into the Biviano long-term business plan. But in pacting with Robe, he knew that in the Czech company’s high standard of manufacture issues such as flicker, colour matching, colour temperature and reliability would be automatically addressed. While many of their peers have wrestled unsuccessfully with the gear shift, ULA has moved effortlessly from the entertainment world into the heartland of Australia’s industrial sector, landing part of a massive AU$2.1bn Queensland Motorways contract to build the new Brisbane Gateway - a road bridge on the Gateway Motorway (M1) which skirts the eastern suburbs of Brisbane. That’s some cultural journey, which goes way beyond the 2km length of the bridge. The original bridge cost AU$140 million to build but the new Gateway Upgrade
www.mondodr.com
Project includes building a second bridge on the coastal side of the original. Working with main contractors, The Leighton Abigroup Joint Venture (LAJV), Anolis will supply 95,000 pieces of LED for the project, the first stage of which will complete this month. But Anolis had to do a lot more than supply a bunch of solid state lights for this government project, as Biviano explained. “Brisbane needed something iconic; we knew what the consultant, Webbs Australia, was looking for in the implementation of their design concept, and our successful bid was based on being able to design the aluminium housing, integrating it seamlessly with the galvanised steel jump screens of the bridge. We also needed to handle the conversion of fibre optic to Ethernet, so we could drive the colour-changing system on ArtNet.” ULA and Anolis also needed to demonstrate the financial strength to underwrite the contract and produce a complete set of installation and test procedures, to support a 20 year design life. “We were pleased that we could tick all of the boxes,” says Biviano. “We have delivered a few monumental projects in Australia over the years, but this is the largest.” Building runs in Con Biviano’s blood. His grandfather built roads and bridges in his native Italy and when Con’s father moved to Australia in the 1950s he carried on the tradition. This hard working legacy was handed down to the young Biviano, and he wasted no time embracing both worlds. In fact he was still in his mid-teens when he became bitten by the importation bug. Studying electrical engineering at school, the academic imperative was overtaken by his professional ambition as he formed his first hire and production company, Audio World, at the age of 16 - and borrowed money to arrange his first container of lighting equipment from Taiwan. “We put it straight into rental and replaced the bearings and power supplies - then
“We were pleased that we could tick all of the boxes, we have delivered a few monumental projects in
Australia over the years, but this is the largest.”
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