Live Design: For the fifth year, projection mapping festival, LUMA, transformed downtown Binghamton, NY, into an immersive storytelling experience. From September 6-7, approximately 55,000 attendees witnessed the colorful and, sometimes interactive, art installations created by artists and mixed media professionals.
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Reading this article immediately made me think about a conversation we had in media stagecraft about mediaturgy. With media being such a new and exciting artistic medium for designing theatrical performances and other performance mediums, people often use projections or media without thinking about the reasons behind their choices. Making something look cool is certainly one way of using media design, but utilizing its transformative ability to enhance storytelling is a much more effective practice. These designs seem like a mix of the two types, meaning that some blend with the performers or tell a story by themselves, but others seem to be a basic design concept put on a building with very little driving force behind them. That isn't to say they aren't still interesting and beautiful to look at, but they lack the element that makes it worthwhile using this technology or the amount of time that was put into mapping the projections.
This is so incredible. After just finishing up the video media design stagecraft class, I now know a lot about projections and projector mapping having experience with it in class. It is so cool how you can essentially put anything on any surface. I know it gets tedious to make it so precise and I am curious if any newer technology can help them with the mapping process. These projections in the photos also look extremely bright. It said in the article that some projectors were double stacked. This must have been done so they could produce the same image but just brighter. Another thing that I found interesting was how some of the projections looked in the photos. Now I know they are photos and you can adjust the exposure and all, but some of the projections look like the subjects are front and up lit with actual lights. Over all this is just a very cool new type of art. Somewhat like graffiti but not permanent. I hope to see one of these events some day.
-Pablo Anton
The idea of having a media based event all teched and have spare time left over amazes me – projection equipment has a reputation of being very finicky. There is no doubt that the progression of video and media technology has been rapid and fantastic. There seems to be no bounds to the reach of how video can be harnessed for performance and art. Some of the images in this slideshow look like something pulled out of a science fiction film. The Sviatovi three dimensional, hologram-like, interactive projections in the Binghamton United Presbyterian Church is absolutely phenomenal. I am curious to what the interactive portion of that performance was, and what kind of structures and surfaces are necessary to create a 360º projection. I think that the LUMA Festival is doing it right, giving these artists the technology and means to create things that have never been done before with video. It is remarkable.
This event must have been remarkable, and remarkably difficult to pull off. It is one thing to do a large event with projection mapping in a cave, as is done in Pittsburgh. I cannot fathom the logistics of creating such a massive event as is described in this article, outdoors in New York, where light pollution rules. The festival seems to be not only a huge advertising opportunity for Panasonic, who supplied nearly all the gear for the event, but also possibly a playground for their technical designers to learn and develop new technologies. I have learned the most in my career when working out of laboratory conditions, and I imagine that the Panasonic teams are able to learn a lot from the artists they work with. Unusual problems require unusual solutions, which can then pave the way for more permanent technical innovations. In the meantime, they get to do some huge, cool, beautiful art for the public.
This is a really incredible event, and I think it showcases the capabilities and aesthetics of projection as they exist today in a way that is really inspiring artists to begin to think about how this could integrate into their work which is really exciting. I know that media equipment has a reputation for being quite finicky among many of us, so having an event based fully around that technology makes my hands clammy, but this is a really cool thing. I think it is also an interesting opportunity for artists to communicate with the people developing the technology that supports their art. It is not often that the direct line of communication exists in this manner, but I imagine a lot of really productive dialogue took place during this event. Giving artists the ability to play with technology that they may not otherwise have been able to interact with is a really cool opportunity, and I wish we had more events like this that existed to just experiment with the limits and boundaries of a whole artistic medium.
Projection mapping is so cool and I love how its becoming integrated into the world of live theatre. I love how this article provides the opportunity for highlighting these top artists and their teams as well as proving a video and a slideshow highlighting their work at the festival. I really enjoyed the video because it gave the opportunity for the reader to actually see all the cool aspects of projection mapping such as watching a building seemingly just start to crumble. The article also provided images of some of the work, however, the designs are meant to be watched or recorded in a video format as there is usually a change or at least movement occuring, so the method of photographs was not very effective in this article. This past mini my local was part of the media team so we got to learn all about projection mapping, and it is really cool to see how the things we learn in our classes are translated to the outside world.
This is such and interesting event. The photos in this article are absolutely amazing and I can’t imagine what these things looked like in person. I personally always think that projection mapping is kind of gimmicky and that while it’s a cool technology it rarely ever tells a story or helps tell it in an interesting way. I understand it can help keep the attention and can look interesting on dynamic object but it is never a wow factor to the event. Here from what I can tell it looks like they used the surfaces and the mapping to grow and move a story through the projection which is really really cool. Projection mapping is one of those technologies that I think greatly helps what the designer is trying to do in media design but often gets abused and turned into the design itself. For example this past summer our media designers entire “design” was projecting stock images of English royalty onto the picture frames we had flown in on stage and periodically changing them with the shift in time. Thats it pictures all I could ever think about is how we could have just done two different linnets and flown them in and out depending on the time period but no we used three projectors and specific rp fabric to do so.
The talent, hard work, and dedication that must go into creating these events are absolutely staggering. I've never seen firsthand what goes into projection mapping but I can't imagine it's easy. It looks quite complicated, time-consuming, and precise. The effects that designers are able to execute and the way they are able to completely change the tone and feel of the space they're projecting onto is one of those things that's always astounded me. Tiger at the Gates, for instance, was the first show I'd seen with REAL projection mapping. At my high school, we had animations projected onto our cyc when we did Seussical the Musical but never had I seen something as robust as what Soo A created for Tiger. I have to say that in my opinion, she completely stole the show with the media design. As the show progressed I wasn't looking forward to the dialogue or the plotline but I was waiting for the next transition or the next opportunity I would have to witness the magic she created in collaboration with lights and sound in particular. The scenes with Cassandra and the projections were especially powerful and opened my eyes to an entire area of design I had never considered. I would love to see a festival like this if given the opportunity.
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