Imagineer at the Fringe 1992

In March 1992, during the Adelaide Fringe, a crew called Imagineer took over the Lion Arts Centre on the corner of North Terrace and Morphett Street for three Saturday nights running. They called the space Sculptribe City. Each night got its own flyer, and each flyer pushed a little harder than the last. The third and final night, GO! on Saturday 21 March, was billed as the ultimate fluoro-tribal warehouse event and the last Imagineer event in Adelaide.

Three Saturdays, three flyers

Expansion opened the run on 7 March, black ink on fluoro orange stock wrapped around a target of concentric rings. Alchemy followed on 14 March, black on white, with a moiré disc at the centre and a block of katakana dropped in between the hand drawings. GO! closed it on 21 March, black on green, built around a ring of Celtic knotwork with the words “Follow your Pathway” at the top.

Read in order, the copy escalates. Expansion was “another” fluoro-tribal warehouse event, Alchemy was “another huge” one and GO! was “the ultimate”. The visuals climbed the same ladder, from psychotronic to retina enhancing to cortex empowering. What stayed put was the door: a $10 donation, or $5 after 5am. Every night promised Melbourne and Adelaide DJs, live bands, a chill out space, a chai stall and a drum room, set among sculptures made from industrial waste. The hours were printed as “Starise to Sunrise”, spelling and all.

Who Imagineer were

Imagineer came at rave from the scrap metal and drum circle side rather than the nightclub side. The Ohms Not Bombs archive names artist and photographer Andrzej Liguz, who later founded Sydney’s Ministry of Random Events, as part of the Imagineer crew, and describes the 1992 Fringe nights as early rave mixed with drumming and full venue transformation. The year before, Liguz had set up a Mutoid Waste Co. Carhenge at a Confest in northern Victoria.

That lineage is all over the artwork. The hands that recur across the flyers have spanners and pen nibs where the fingertips should be, and one fist grips a tool that is a spanner at one end and a paintbrush at the other. GO! signs off with a Reduce Reuse Recycle roundel in the bottom corner. The sculptures were the venue, and the dance floor sat inside them.

GO! the DJs

GO! is the only one of the three flyers to print a lineup. Under the heading “DJ’s Booth (Melb.)” it reads:

• HMC
• X-Citement
• MPK
• Maestro D
• Kršna (Melb.)
• and guests

HMC is the name that travelled furthest. Carmelo “Cam” Bianchetti had been playing Adelaide rooms since the 1980s, and within a few years of GO! his releases on Adelaide label Juice Records, Phreakin’, LSD and 6AM among them, had him tagged as the Godfather of Australian Techno. He later reinvented himself as Late Nite Tuff Guy, reworking disco and soul for a new generation of dance floors. In March 1992 most of that was still ahead of him.

MPK and Maestro D are Adelaide names that have stuck around. Both were on the bill at Origin II: Chosen, the reunion rave in Adelaide on 5 April 2026, thirty four years after GO!. X-Citement and Kršna are the two names on this list we know least about. The flyer gives X-Citement no city tag and marks Kršna as a Melbourne guest.

No MC is credited anywhere on the flyer. If you were on the floor that night and remember who had the mic, or you can tell us more about X-Citement or Kršna, get in touch.

The rest of the night

Visidub, also marked (Melb.), handled the cortex empowering visuals. The flyer lists wicked bands, the chill out space, the chai stall and the drum room, plus fluoro toy giveaways, supernatural acts and performance for mind and body in a new environment of industrial waste sculptures. BYO, no glass please.

Then came Sunday. At 3pm, with the sun long up, Imagineer auctioned off the artwork. “Everything must go,” the flyer said, and that included the sculptures that had made up Sculptribe City. The line at the foot of the page closed the story: the last Imagineer event in Adelaide.

Three flyers, three Saturday nights and one Sunday auction are a small piece of the Adelaide rave story, but they catch it early, when a warehouse night could be half art installation and half dance floor. If you have photos, a ticket, a tape or your own memory of the Lion Arts Centre in March 1992, send it to Anthems.