This large-scale projection turns the facade of a building into an interactive pin-ball machine. By incorporating the original architecture of the building, they succeed in making it almost blend in with the environment.
More information here.
Amon Tobin ‘ISAM’ Live (Extended Trailer) from Ninja Tune on Vimeo.
These high-quality audio/visual shows began as music concerts with DJ Amon Tobin. However, they soon became an immersive all-encompassing experience with large projections onto enormous structures.
More information here.
These architectural distortions are intriguing ways to temporarily interfere with an place. They give an air of destruction at the beginning, and then turn into a narrative about human expressiveness.
More information here.
KREISROT | Bauhaus Dessau | facade projection from URBANSCREEN on Vimeo.
This urban projection was performed in Dessau, Germany. It plays with light and the way that buildings change depending on the placement of the sun. It brings daylight into the night time, and shows how much our perception is changed just by light.
More information here.
This moving bicycle projects animated digital graffiti onto buildings and streets. The mobile street art machine transforms areas and is considered a “guerrilla” projection.
More information here.
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Here are some ideas and questions that summarize my interest in stock photos:
– Stock photos represent ideal worlds in which bliss, love and stability
are normal.
– How can we reconcile the perfect/false worlds of stock photos?
– Do stock photos point to prevailing notions of normativity?
– A game-ritual grants us temporary access to the hyperreality of stock photos.
I staged the intervention in the Stever House television room. While not exactly a public place, it is a room where students gather to relax and socialize. I was wary of carrying out the performance in a space that would interfere with people’s work or daily consumption patterns. Perhaps my hesitation to bring the project to the public in earnest reflects an underlying insecurity regarding its premise – or my own communicative abilities. I don’t yet feel confident framing a personal obsession as something that has intrinsic value for others. Still, I feel that stock photos embody important cultural ideals that I have yet to fully articulate.
I announced the performance in a public Facebook event as follows:
“Some friends of mine need help. They say they have no thoughts left. They just stand around holding empty banners.
All I know is that there’s not much time to act.”
The event itself was an interactive game show, in which I was the host and organizer. Participants took turns standing in front of a whiteboard, providing stock photo people with new thoughts. I used an openFrameworks projection mapping library in order to calibrate the projection to the whiteboard surface. I also placed portions of the image around the perimeter of the whiteboard in warped perspective. This reinforced the sense I was trying to communicate – that this whiteboard was an unstable portal to another world (the world of stock photos).
Concretely, the participants used dry-erase markers to write words on the blank banners that the fourteen photos featured. While participants stood in front of the board, generic call waiting “muzak” was played from a hidden speaker, along with a synthetic voice counting down from 30 to 1. The audio was meant to convey a sense of urgency. I recall timed fitness evaluations in High School gym class that relied on similar tactics. A quivering instruction box read “Help! We have no thoughts. Give us some thoughts while there is still time.” Graphically, this instruction box took cues from Soviet era graphic design.
Technically, the project worked well – the audio provided a crucial sense of limited time, and therefore unease. The projection itself was clear and visible on the whiteboard.
Regarding the failures of the project, there is one that is particularly glaring. I found it difficult to establish a coherent tone for the project: it wavered uncomfortably between a sincere attempt to help virtual people in “crisis”, and an organized mockery of those very people. The project relied on the idea that stock photos depict perfect people and scenarios onto which we are obliged project our own ideas – but I never verified this premise independent of my own feel for it. Basically, I found it difficult to communicate what this activity was, and what ends it was meant to serve. I was curious what words people would use to contextualize generic imagery, but I must consider the likelihood that this curiosity didn’t extend beyond myself.
It seemed like the participants (the six that showed up) generally enjoyed the performance, judging from the video of it in which shows a friendly climate with an undercurrent of humor.
A future iteration of this performance might employ high resolution images. The ones I used were low quality, since it would have cost >$100 to purchase the photos in full resolution.
Software Tools used:
openFrameworks 0.8 with ofxMtlMapping2D
Photoshop CS5
Adobe Audition CS5
Time Tilings is about time, space and perception. Pablo Valbuena explores the overlap of the physical and the virtual, the generation of mental spaces by the observer, the dissolution of the boundaries between real and perceived, the links between space and time and the use of light as prime matter. More info here
The Motion Project was a collaboration between a lot of clever creative people working together to create a machine that turns motion into music. The client for the project, Frucor (makers of V energy drink), together with their agency Colenso BBDO, kitted-out a warehouse space for this project to grow in and gathered together a group of talented people from a number of creative fields. More here
Urban Projections is a group of mixed media artists who have recently created a series of videos in which projection artists and graffiti/spray paint artists collaborate on murals. These videos begin with the graffiti artist laying down the base painting for the piece, and then the projection artist goes in and plays with the space in and around the painting adding movement and complexity to the scene.
More here…
