AV Nation Podcast
Check out the newest AV Nation Podcast featuring none other than yours truly along with Paul and Richard Marganski from PicoPros.com, George Tucker, and Tim Albright (from AV Nation). Lots of great ideas concerning the tiniest of our projector brethren…..
Form and Substance
Big reminder- Form and Substance: Projection Mapping in Contemporary Art, the first group exhibition in the United States dedicated exclusively to artists working with projection mapping as a medium- is this Friday. If you’re in the NYC area and you’re a fan, get to this exhibition!
In addition to the already outstanding line-up (including Davy and Kristin McGuire, John Ensor Parker, Joanie Lemercier), they’ve added two new artists to the roster: Joel Fitzpatrick is a fine artist, fashion designer, interior designer, lighting designer, and production designer. He will be presenting three works, including a collaboration with New York based painter and graffiti artist Adam Dare.
The exhibition opens Friday, May 10 at 6 PM at the Gowanus Ballroom at 55 9th Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The opening party is from 6 PM to 10 PM, and entry is free.
There will be a $10 cover charge starting at 10 PM, with Percussion Lab residents Nooka Jones and Archie Pelago playing till 4 AM. Proceeds from the door go to benefit the Gowanus Ballroom, which is still recovering from damage incurred during Hurricane Sandy.
The full list of artists is below. We are also still accepting tax-deductibe donations to help defray costs, including travel and accommodations for our foreign artists, promotional expenses, and production costs for several works. All donations are processed by Mister Artsee, a 501 (c) (3) arts-industry non-profit. Email for details about donating.
Tekamaki a d3 Studio
d3 Technologies are pleased to announce San Carlos based rental and staging company Tekamaki have signed up to become the latest d3 Studio. With a client base ranging from NASA to Nintendo and Electronic Arts to Google, Tekamaki profiles as a high-end technical service provider with deep roots in display technology and an extremely knowledgeable staff.
Tekamaki’s capabilities range from concept development through process management, project design and staging. A small, flexible company with decades of industry experience between its team members, Tekamaki’s focus has always been on teamwork, talent, innovation and the latest in display and media technology to help their clients successfully communicate their message. Tekamaki used d3 systems on the September 2012 DreamForce event for Salesforce.com, which saw the entire San Francisco City Hall mapped up for a one-off performance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Based in San Carlos, California, Tekamaki team members include Matt Ward (co-founder of Element Labs), Joe Conway, Ron Machado, Robert Loney and Christopher Burdett.
UMF Carl Cox Mega Structure
I know I know….Coachella’s in full swing and UMF is so- well, done. But UMF was a huge hit this year (surprise) and along with being a huge hit, you have to have huge structures- like this one:
AG Lights & Sound - Mega Structure - Ultra Music Festival 2013 - Video from ASK Media Productions on Vimeo.
Credit:
Design by Stephen Lieberman – SJ Lighting -sjlighting.net Production by AG Lights & Sound – ag.tc Video by ASK Media Productions – Adam Kaplan – askmediaproductions.com
Mapping Festival 2013
Mapping Festival 2013 is about to get under way in Geneva so get tickets NOW. There’s something for everybody- installations, VJing, and workshops on mapping and stage design from the likes of Boris Edelstein, Joanie LeMercier, and Phillipe Chaurand.
“The Mapping Festival is a multidisciplinary festival dedicated to audiovisual arts and digital cultures. As the sole broadcasting space of this magnitude in Switzerland, the festival is now also recognised internationally, and this with the richness of programming. Mapping Festival offers every year audiovisual performances, installations, clubbing parties, live performances, architectural mapping, as well as workshops and conferences.
Thanks to this unique diversity aspect, the festival is recognised throughout the world as an major event, a real experimental meeting space, for creation and exchange with its innovative thinking in the field of audiovisual arts.
Now in its eighth edition, the Mapping Festival has steadily grown and has become one of the leading events of its kind in Europe.”
Some time off…
Good Lord. I haven’t posted for some time because- well- I’m lazy. Actually that’s a lame excuse, but spring around my place is a crazy-busy time of year and some things take a back seat. My family and work are not in that category so posting falls by the wayside. Stay tuned though, there’s a bunch of stuff coming out of NAB week and Coachella is ramping up so I expect there will be some neato content coming. I’ve also been playing a lot with d3 and I expect I’ll post something about the release of V.11- speaking of which, I just finished a run of the broadway musical American Idiot which had a pretty killer d3 rig. It was great to be able to speak with Kirt (the op for the show) at length about the ins-and-outs of the system, which apparently was a custom rig that Ash put together for them. I’ll see if it’s OK to post some shots…..
See you all soon.
QED projectionmaps BBC Comic Relief- RED Nose Day
Check out this massive work from QED. They were contracted to projectionmap the stage for the BBC broadcast of “Funny for Money”, a huge fundraiser put on by Red Nose Day to help people in need.
From their press release:
“QED Productions successfully delivered ground-breaking video mapping and stage lighting integration for Comic Relief’s seven-hour television broadcast on BBC One, by using nineteen high-brightness Christie 3-chip DLP projectors.
According to QED Director Paul Wigfield “not only was this was the most challenging indoor projection mapping ever attempted but also the entire rig had to be installed in just one day”. (more…)
A little Madmapper experiment
Such a versatile tool, our friend Madmapper. This is a fine example of how to push a little projector juuussssst about beyond it’s capabilities. It’s an old Panasonic desk PJ (800×600) on it’s side, shooting about 50deg. off-axis, onto a wall roughly 40′ away. It’s in the lobby of the building where I work and the idea is to have it on the wall for an artist’s reception. It’s our 50th anniversary coming up and we plan on displaying one work of art in each 48″ square and to give the artists a sense of the scale that it would end up being. Talk to me after we’ve hung 50 pieces of art using scaffolding and lag screws…..Lovin’ Madmapper though!
IU Opera Akhnaten
Indiana University’s outstanding Opera department teamed up with the Indianapolis Opera to produce Philip Glass’ masterpiece “Akhnaten”, a first in many ways for opera in the midwest. It was the first time the collegiate program has staged a Glass opera, it was the first time a Glass opera has been seen in Indianapolis, and it was the first time I got to lay my hands on the venerable Barco FLM 22+. There’s an excellent article over at NUVO- worth a read…but I’ll focus mainly on the projection. I’m a huge Philip Glass fan (occasionally OD’ing on the Qatsi trilogy is a fave pastime) so I was stoked when I learned I would be the tip-of-the-spear for an actual production in the 30th anniversary year of the seminal work. For the last week I’ve been hunkered down at PFHQ breathing 98 degree air- sitting behind two of these behemoth DLP projectors. The rig was originally designed to have both projectors doing different things, but with the shot from our venue slightly (!) different than the original presenting venue, we decided to converge and let ‘em rip.
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- My view for the run
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- Aux. air conditioning a MUST when using 2 FLM 22's!!!
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- My introduction to HVAC engineering
I know, you’ll all want to see gorgeous panoramic displays of the actual imagery, but all I had time for was the down-and-dirty tech porn. Sorry- you’ll just have to find it on Youtube. Playback was achieved with HogPC software on a laptop feeding Artnet to the PJ’s and to another machine (a beefy Dell Precision) running Arkaos MediaMaster Pro. Mike Schwandt was kind enough to cue the show with a Hog Playback wing, so the run was super easy and quite accurate. We shot about 120′ onto a tight-weave white scrim for an image roughly 50′w x 32′h. There were a few unique shapes…one was the scrim flown out to a trim of about 8′h x full width for a scrolling Book of the Dead. Another was an open, unfocused nebula during a Firefly effect that was quite pretty. All in all it was a piece of cake and the IU Opera was great to work with. Hope to do it again someday!
Stay tuned in May when the IO presents The Flying Dutchman, heavy on the projection!
AntiVJ Paleodictyon
AntiVJ has once again conquered a major projection mapping on a very unique structure. Paleodictyon is shot onto the curved exterior of architect Shigeru Ban’s the Centre Pompidou Metz, France. “(The piece is) loosely inspired by the work and research of deep-sea expert Peter A. Rona, (and) abolishes notions of scale by contrasting micro-architecture with human construction. Fascinated by the marks left by unknown creatures called Paleodictyon Nodosum, he offers the hypothesis that these hexagonal structures are designed in order to cultivate bacteria. A modern day Captain Nemo, Peter A. Rona wanders relentlessly across the seabed looking to discover (more…)
Museo Nazionale del Cinema uses projectiondesign
As part of a wholesale technological overhaul in one of Europe’s most evocative museum spaces, projectiondesign has supplied 40 of its high-performance DLP® projectors to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy. The projectors were provided by and supported by Italian distribution partner, AGMULTIVISION and installed by Italian System Integrator OVRIT VIDEO. Image courtesy OVRIT Video
Housed inside the Mole Antonelliana, (more…)
Rubik’s Cube RGB Wall is Astounding
When I was a kid in the early 80′s, I had the particularly nerdy priviledge of participating in the first Rubik’s Cube-athon at Magic Mountain in California. 2,000 or so fanatics got to compete to see who could solve the cube the fastest and while my sub-one minute time garnered me a T-shirt, I sadly wasn’t even close. Fast forward to today and the cube is being used for far more fascinating devices- as witnessed in the Cube Works Studios Rubik’s Cube walls and murals. I know I know- it’s not digital…it’s not even electronic…but it’s a superb representation (in all it’s analog glory) of exactly what we see when we look at an RGB display. For a little primer, check out the Bayer Filter info….Pointillism is nothing new. Seurat, Signac, and even old Vincent Van Gogh himself were practitioners of the technique- but this…this is just fantastic!
The Cube Works is a Toronto-based art collaborative that specializes in using the ubiquitous cube for stunning, cutting-edge works of art. Smaller pieces have up to 4,000 of them and the record breaking Macau Skyline Mosaic has a whopping 85,794! In the projection and LED world we fret about pixelmapping and overlap of exacting dimensions…imagine having to flip a cube around to juuuuussst the right combination in order to physically replicate a 3×3 pixel grid! INSANE!
Peruse more of the work of Nick Hall and the Cube Works at their website and on their Facebook page.
The photos speak for themselves:
White Kanga Strikes Again for CTL Logistics
The incredibly inventive folks over at White Kanga recently did this huge industrial for CTL Logistics. Utilizing eight 22k projectors and Touchdesigner, they transported the audience on an intergalactic themed presentation, and then fed live video of the entertainment into the animated video frames. These guys do some amazing work- make sure to check out their piece that appeared on PF previously… MPS v1.0
As a bonus, I thought I’d hip you to their Interactive Kinetic Mapping System, Building version: iKMS Building v3 from White Kanga on Vimeo.
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Electrosonic for Caltrans
It’s a fact that LA has the craziest traffic on the planet outside of NYC. I used to commute to Hollywood on a daily basis from the San Gabriel Valley and I can tell you- it’s not a party…at least not a party that’s fun to attend. Apart from the wackos and endless commuters, who takes care of the mundane? Which roads are open? Which ones are full of holes? Where is the traffic the worst? That job falls to Caltrans- and it’s not an easy one. So I was fascinated to see the following press release from our friends at Electrosonic about upgrading the District 7 Command Center video wall.
When Caltrans District 7 began the first phase of a multi-phase AV system upgrade at its Los Angeles facility, it contracted with Electrosonic to create a brighter, more reliable video wall for traffic monitoring that takes advantage of the latest in projection technology.
“Caltrans District 7 has more than 400 cameras on the highways of Los Angeles and Ventura counties,” says Electrosonic project manager Guy Fronte. “They can review camera feeds 24/7 in the facility and when there’s a traffic event – road damage or an accident – they can magnify that feed on the videowall. The videowall is integral to 24-hour traffic management.”
The existing videowall comprises a 12-screen center unit in a 4×3 configuration flanked by a pair of 6-screen 3×2 units. The giant wall features 80-inch diagonal screens in the center and 52-inch screens on the sides.
The standard format of the wall has single-camera feeds (more…)
Chris Shen- Infra
I have a friend experimenting with low-rez video (of the tube variety) and I said I’d look into some ideas…little did I know it would lead me to Chris Shen’s fascinating work- Infra. A TV made from discarded remote controls. There’s so many great things about this piece that it’s hard to know where to start. Hacking, tinkering, re-purposing, and a smidge of nostalgia all rolled into one glorious low-rez display that has to be seen with infrared goggles. Love it! Personally, I use the Harmony 720 (actually three of them) and though I tried really hard- I could not find one in the photos. When I purchase a new monitor or TV, the remote is usually the first thing I toss- knowing full-well there are better alternatives out there. Kind of makes me think why the manufacturer bothers at all with a lame remote, but that’s a discussion for another day. The whole thing is wired to a Peggy 2, courtesy Evil Mad Scientist Labratories. Be sure to read the write up HERE.
From his press release:
In 1955, Eugene Polley (1915 – 2012) designed the first ever wireless remote control for the Zenith Radio Corporation. At the press of a button, the remote would magically flash an invisible light from across the room and turn your TV set on, off, or change channels, all without you budging from the couch. It was an invention that changed the nature of television.
To kick off 2013 at 18 Hewett Street, Protein is proud to present interactive artist Chris Shen’s original artwork INFRA, a largescale installation that marks the (more…)
Lightbox from NYX Visual
NYX Visual Label has done some pretty impressive work in the last year, and they’ve expanded their studio offerings with NYX Atelier, focusing on the design and production of permanent digital art installs and light devices for private and public clients in Europe. Louis de Castro tells me “LIGHTBOX is a semi-modular, custom build LED ceiling that was designed by NYX Atelier for the reopening of Paris underground music venue “Panic Room” in January 2013. LIGHTBOX was developed by NYX Atelier 
along with Vincent Coutelin, our technical director, and Romain Belloche, our light designer, both overseeing the fabrication and visual programming aspects of the installation.
Thanks to Vincent we had the chance to travel to Shenzhen, China to purchase all the parts and electronics required but also to visit the fantastic factories and suppliers that now allow us to be more flexible than ever on the products and technologies we decide to use on each project.
LIGHTBOX from NYX Visual Label on Vimeo.
The development of the installation also featured a fullfiling partnership with young French company, Chromateq, that supplied us with the DMX controllers and LED Player Software offering great control and customization on a simple package.
Not having the possibility budget wise to create a completely new designed software and controller we turned to them for providing a complete solution that would allow us to concentrate on the design, technical sourcing and fabrication but also provide great tools for developing rich content following the artistic vision for the piece.”
Make sure to check out NYX on their site as well as other projects that have been featured here on Projectionfreak.
Digital Projection Titan Super Quad vs. Truck
Finally a review that I should’ve thought of. I don’t care about lumens, features, resolutions, lamp life, blahblahblah….I want to know if I can drive my truck over your projector! A couple of things strike me about this video. One- that DPI has a 20k that is small enough to drive over, and two- the International Sales and Marketing for DP drives the same truck as I do! Woo-hoo! When DPI sends me a unit to test, I too can drive over it with complete confidence. It’s no secret that we’re big DPI fans here at Projectionfreak. I use two of their Lightning 35hd’s all the time and they are outstanding. DPI is stepping up their rental and staging projectors with the Titan Super Quad 20k. It’s got 4 UHP lamps that can theoretically pull 8,000 hours of service, dual DVI, 3g-SDI, and HDMI 1.4 inputs, multimode warp and edge-blend, and an intelligent lens mount that can memorize positioning from .67 to 11.2:1. And it weighs just under 40kg so with the combined rigging frame it’s a cinch to fly two! Check out the RavePubs product video from ISE 2013 after you watch them try to crush it:
Castle Nightclub Gets a Rig from DCBolt Productions
Devin Wambolt over at DCBolt Productions gave me the heads-up on this crazy nightclub install they just completed. The club is Castle Nightclub in Chicago and they premiered the system for a huge NYE bash this year. Devin reports: “We are using three different types of LED’s in this system, (aside from the house lights) LED panels, LED strips, and LED modules. Our LED strips are (32x) SMD5050 LED pixels per meter, our Modules are (5x) SMD5050 LEDs per pixel, the LED panels are 6 millimeter pitch SMD2835 LED pixels. The led strips and modules are run by MADRIX Ultimate for real-time dynamic playback. The LED panel screens are being driven by a custom configured Resolume Arena setup.
Some pretty impressive work, and I’ll be sure to check it out next time I’m in Chicago!
Teleknoika Projectionmapping Workshop
Roberto Fazio joined forces with Joanie LeMercier in a projectionmapping workshop sponsored by Teleknoika. Looks like it happened in November, but through the magic of Vimeo and Projectionfreak, you too can see the action. The turnout really underscores the popularity and interest that this medium has enjoyed the past year or so. Telenoika Mapping Workshop 2012 (english) from Telenoika on Vimeo.
Microsoft IllumiRoom
Brett Jones, over at Projection Mapping Central sent me a really neat project he worked on as an intern at Redmond. Microsoft’s ‘IllumiRoom’ is a proof-of-concept system for augmenting the area around a display with projected visualizations. Gamers- take note! Yikes…what’s going to happen when I use this with 3D glasses????
The Kinect has revolutionized a lot of stuff recently…including a few projects featured here at Projectionfreak- The MIDAS project, NuFormer, and the future of car buying.
2012 – La 2 Spain TV Mapping
I thought this was a pretty unique way of ending a news year. Most of the time we’re treated to the same old ‘one-shot’ style story or a list of some sort….but projectionmapping is far cooler! Plus- who can’t resist a decent time-lapse? Juanjo Fernandez and his cohorts used a single 20k DPI to shoot this, although they said they’d rather have had 3 (who wouldn’t?)…real-world budgets- ugh.
Juanjo Fernandez of Gnomalab used Millumin to map it, along with:
Oscar Teston (Creator of VjSpain community) in art direction.
Rafel Gallego as Producer.
La bocina with the sound.
Romera diseño e Infografia, with the visual content, 3D and 2D.
all imagery courtesy/copyright Gnomalab
2012 summary News in La 2 Spain TV with mapping | Resumen del año 2012 en La 2 from Romera Diseño e Infografía S.L on Vimeo. Making off en timelapse del Mapping "2012" La 2 Noticias de TVE. from gnomalab on Vimeo.
Time Lapse
SOTA Creative 360-deg. Mapping for Subaru Australia
SOTA Creative drives game changing experience for Subaru Australia.
Following product supply challenges that resulted from the tragic Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Subaru Australia needed a game changing communication experience to re-motivate their Dealer Network and Launch two new models. As long term experiential agency for Subaru Australia, the team at SOTA conceived and produced a one-off experience incorporating a “Virtual Drive”, where all 240 people in the audience became passengers in a unique 360 degree cinematic creation. On over 125 metres of continuous screen, a Full High Definition projection system took our audience on a drive through some of Australia’s iconic landscape and environments.
SOTA Creative conceived and produced two major 360 degree cinematic experiences, one each for the reveals of the Impreza and the XV, plus continually changing 360 degree visual effects for environment design and speaker support for the duration of the evening. The images were created and edited to be delivered at Full High Definition (22,000 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high). The virtual drive experience was shot using a purpose built 9 camera rig which was mounted on a custom-fitted Film vehicle. Post production was done both in Los Angeles and Sydney and converted by SOTA to be projected through 12 Christie Projectors (HD-10k) and a Dataton Watchout Control system. Haycom provided the Christies and the staging/rigging.
all imagery courtesy/copyright SOTA Creative
After a worldwide search, SOTA Creative sourced a Los Angeles based camera system and rig capable of delivering 22,000 pixel width 360 degree images, developed a post production process to deliver the finished programs to a Watchout controlled system and then to 12 matched Christie projectors. Social Animal used the incredible SA360 rig to deliver the goods. (Make sure to check out their site for some cool interactive loops and extra footage- and some pretty amazing case studies).The continuous audience surround screen surface was a challenge in itself, needing to be floor to ceiling, while allowing “openings” for audience arrival, F&B service and the revealing of Vehicles and Entertainment. The LA team from Social Animal came to Australia for literally a 3 day shoot. 
We also used a still shoot of the interior of the car to produce the interior of the car and then this was added as the foreground of the video. We then had the challenge of doing rescaling up to 22,00 pixel width and had to crop it to our Aspect Ratio requirements and cut it up to suit the 12 Christie projectors (12 movies playing together using the ‘Watch out System”. And before all of this could happen we had to produce the foreground plate with the ‘interior of the car’. We produced this as a 22,000 pixels wide by 1080 high all played in full high definition. The end result was projection 106 metres around all the audience. Notice, also that the ‘rear view mirror’ had the same image as the ‘rear window’.
KRAFTWERK 3D With Dataton Watchout
Linköping, Sweden, 11 January 2013: German electro pop pioneers, Kraftwerk will use the dynamic interactive and 3D features of Dataton WATCHOUT™ multi-image and presentation software, for all on-stage digital scenography at their hotly anticipated tours and concerts’ programme throughout 2013. Formed in 1970, Kraftwerk began using Stereoscopic 3D for the MoMA concerts and ”Way out West” Swedish Rock Festival in Spring 2012.
WATCHOUT manages projected 3D content on a large stage backdrop creating a powerful abstract presence in front of audiences (more…)
Scotch and Soda Please!
And here I thought that was just my favorite bar reply….
Netherlands-based media firm Circus Family combined forces with Jurlights and came up with this huge 360-degree projectionmapping at Gashouder Amsterdam. The gig was for Amsterdam Couture house, Scotch and Soda, for the launch of their 2013 line. Using four Hippo HD’s they were able to pipe content to ten Barco HD20′s mounted in a ring in the center. They used the ScreenWarp feature to cut the roundness and then threw in a couple of Hippo Critters with a 16×16 DVI matrix to finish it off. Technician Menno Broere tells me they didn’t even have to blend the projectors…just masked out some physical attributes. That’s how we like it- simple and clean. So many times this type of technology is ‘over done’ from the production side, so it’s nice to see people keeping to the oldest axiom in show biz- Keep It Simple Stupid.
Scotch&Soda - SS13 - 360° Projection from Circus Family on Vimeo.
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