Mapping Festival 2013
There’s some great videos coming out of the Mapping Festival 2013 held May 2-12 in Geneva. I’ll post some more this week- We’ve seen the work of Bordos.Artworks in the past, but here’s a reminder- I wish I had a decent pair of 3D goggles…..
BORDOS.ARTWORKS AND INVITED ARTISTS @ MAPPING FESTIVAL 2013 / MUSEUM OF ART AND HISTORY / GENEVA from Bordos.ArtWorks / Bordos L Zsolt on Vimeo.
Form and Substance footage
By all accounts it looks like Form and Substance was a big success. If you couldn’t make it to the show, here’s a little teaser footage with a few recognizable pieces….
Hoping to get some details from Bryan in the near future…
Form and Substance: Projection Mapping in Contemporary Art. Spring 2013 from Integrated Visions Productions on Vimeo.
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.
Leviathan’s Been Busy…
Collecting awards, that is. Chicago based visual studio Leviathan garnered the Platinum Remi Award for Visual/Special Effects this past weekend at the 46th WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival (www.worldfest.org) for their original short film “Lilith”. Then, at the FITC Toronto Design and Technology Festival last Monday, Leviathan’s executive creative director Jason White personally accepted the FITC Best Animation Award for the studio’s sensational “Wooden Toy” project for Ninja Tune recording artist Amon Tobin.
“We have an awful lot of people to thank for putting us in the position to earn this recognition from the judges of the world’s longest-running independent film festival, and from the FITC, which covers the future of everything innovative, technical and creative,” White began. “Across the spectrum of our phenomenal creative partners including V Squared Labs and Red Moon Theater among many others, unbelievably talented and passionate artists and craftspeople, to my fellow principals Chat Hutson and Matt Daly, we are counting a lot of blessings this week. Immense thanks to everyone who has played a part in our success to date, and with this recognition, we are even more inspired to create phenomenal visual experiences.”
Since launching in 2010, Leviathan’s collaborations with agencies, brands and leading filmmakers have rendered scores of sensational projects across all markets and industries and earned award recognition from the Association of Independent Music, Communication Arts Magazine, the AICP, The D Show, The One Club, and the Themed Entertainment Association.
Earlier in his day at FITC, Jason presented his original talk entitled “Hyperblender, the collision of art and technology” an hour-long presentation discussing vision, our past and future of creating transformative visual experiences. According to feedback from conference organizers and on Twitter, it was one of the most talked-about of the conference’s 70 sessions, which drew over 1,200 attendees from around the world over the past three days.
Congratulations Leviathan! Well deserved accolades!
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.”
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…)
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!
Integrated Visions to launch Form and Substance, a Group Exhibition
Exciting news from Brian and Michelle over at Integrated Visions- they’re opening a group exhibition entitled “Form and Substance” at the Gowanus Ballroom on the weekend of May 10-12. It’ll feature works by Joanie LeMercier, Claudio Sinatti, Domingo Zapata, and more. Here’s an excerpt fro the release note:
“Integrated Visions Productions is excited to announce an additional creative path for 2013. In the wake of the success of the ‘Codex Dynamic’ group exhibition at the 2012 DUMBO Arts Festival (see PF article), which received the festival’s Grand Prize and Best in Show awards, we’re focusing on more intimate artwork.
We’ve developed a series of projection mapped paintings, combining fine art painting techniques with cutting-edge, projection-mapped animations to create a hybrid medium that we see as the first new terrain being explored by working artists in the 21st Century – akin to Impressionism and similar upstart movements at the turn of the last century.
We quickly realized that there exists a global community of artists and technologists working at the intersection of the traditional media of painting and sculpture and projection mapping, and we began to contact our favorite practitioners and curate a group exhibition.
Form and Substance, North America’s first group exhibition dedicated to projection mapping as a fine arts medium, will take place the weekend of May 10-12, at the Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn, New York. The Frieze Art Fair, the enfant terrible of the global festival circuit, takes place in New York over the same weekend, making this a unique opportunity to make a global impression.”
If you’re in NYC or anywhere near on that weekend- this is one NOT TO MISS.
A Journey Through Bass
And for a slow Monday- a little homage to UK bass music from collective mo:ya. Guest starring Modul8 and Madmapper. A journey through bass from [mo:ya] on Vimeo.
John Ensor Parker Talks TEDx and Projection
TED talks are all the rage- and this one made my Monday! John Ensor Parker is a projection artist who recently did CODEX Dynamic at the DUMBO Artsfest. His work is pretty fascinating and this video gives just a little glimpse into the process behind making a large-scale work like CODEX happen. Yeah, yeah…we all know it takes servers and projectors and lots of cable- but John emphasizes the importance of knowing where our medium came from….we owe a lot to the past. Check out the article previously on PF HERE. Many thanks John!
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:
Resolume Content Creation Contest
The folks at Resolume are throwing a content creation party and they want you all to come! From their blog:
To participate, all you have to do is fire up Resolume and go crazy with the sources, effects and blend modes. Make combinations that you didn’t think were possible. Stack effects as high as wedding cake to make something totally new out of that Solid Color. Flip the order of the blend modes and see what comes out. Above all, have fun with it!
The only rule is simple: you can only use the built-in effects and sources of Resolume. No still images, videos or webcam footage.
Record your output, upload it to Vimeo and post it as a reply on this thread. Don’t forget to Include your .avc as a zipped attachment.
Amaze us. First Runner Up walks away with a brand spanking license of Avenue. The Winner walks away with Arena and gets to release his or her work on the label.
Now go and make us proud!
Deadline 28th of February.
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…)
Projection Studio Enchants Saltwell Park
London UK based projection artist Ross Ashton, returned to Gateshead’s Saltwell Park for the Enchanted Parks 2012 event, with a beautifully imaginative large format show “Glass House” celebrating the work of Victorian stained glass artist, William Wailes. The six and a half minute piece was projected on to the front face of Saltwell Towers, Wailes’ magnificent former home in the grounds of the Park, and ran every evening for the duration of the after dark experience. It was accompanied by a soundscape created by Karen Monid and the whole work was designed from the start as an integral visual and audio narrative.
A single PIGI 6Kw projector with a double rotating scroller was used to project the images, fitted with a 25cm lens and located 35 metres away producing a 20 metre wide picture.
Challenging environmental conditions included temperatures down to -5ºC and 15 cm of snow on the ground, making it a tough working environment, but also added to the magic and ephemeral nature of the installation once up and running – which looked stunning! (ED.- Doing projection of any kind in weather like this is always a challenge often requiring special boxes to house the units in. Even with the incredible heat they put off, temps have to be stabilized across the whole piece…)
“Glass House” juxtaposed the chemical reactions involved in the process of making stained glass against those of the Great Fire of Gateshead, which ripped through the heart of the city in 1854. The fire, though destructive, was followed by the rebuilding and regeneration of the city. Ashton and Monid’s collaborative works are renowned for fusing specific themes and local history relevant to individual buildings with fabulously accessible and entertaining results. Ashton commissioned locally based photographer Shaun Thubron to visit all the churches in the area which still have intact Wailes stained glass windows, including St Nicholas’ Cathedral, Newcastle and others, which he used as original materials for his PIGI artwork.
The audio script was derived from a number of mid 19th century resources including accounts of the Great Fire and printed documents from the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, which enthusiastically embraced Wailes’ work.
Extracts were chosen by Monid and read by a local community group, the Friends of Saltwell Park. These were additionally composed as multi-layered sound textures.
She also used multiple glass sounds and tones – both musically and as effects – including a rendition of local folk song, ‘The Waters of Tyne’. The sound system comprised two KV2 EX12 speakers with playback via an Alesis HD24 hard drive, and all the original work was created and played back in stereo.
Ashton comments, “I was very proud to be involved in Enchanted Parks again this year, and very pleased with the results. The idea of bringing local history alive and reaching out to people in live installation like this is very exciting and rewarding”.
Enchanted Parks is organised by the Newcastle & Gateshead Initiative (NGI) and Magnetic Events.
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.
Seeper Arts Gets Festive on BBC
Celebrate the holidays the Seeper way! The BBC invited the nation to celebrate the start of its 2012 Christmas Lights in a techno-driven finale at the closing of the One Show Live on BBC one. Clips taken from popular BBC programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who were reworked by seeper into a two- minute, three-dimensional BBC Christmas experience to kick- start the festive celebrations in a way not seen before. “Growing up in the UK the BBC has always been central to Christmas for me”, said seeper’s founder, Evan Grant. “It’s a pleasure to use such an iconic building as our canvas. This is a great opportunity to celebrate Christmas the seeper way.
They used five of the Barco HDQ-2K 40, Barco’s giant 3D-capable projector in a specially built FOH rig to blast through the infamous London fog. Units supplied by XL Video, natch. XL recently invested heavily in Barco’s latest super high brightness projectors and these were no doubt part of that batch.
The proprietary “SeeperServer” was used for playback of media.
Seeper has done some pretty outstanding gigs in the last year, and you can read more here. By all means, have a look at their website- as well as their Vimeo channel. And for some great info on their process (as well as projectionmapping in general) check out this slide deck.
some great large-scale work!
BBC One Christmas Launch from seeper on Vimeo.
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