junction: light motion installation under King William Bridge for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts

photos by Paul Armour. For larger versions (and a few more images) go to the junction album on flickr.

I was commissioned to make a new installation as part of the blinc program for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts which took place end of february / beginning of march 2015. Blinc, curated by Craig Morrison and Joel Cockrill, was a series of outdoor projection and light-based art works, including works by Squidsoup and Bordos Artworks among others.

I chose my location based on some images Joel sent me, and I immediately got drawn to the beautiful arches of the pedestrian walkway / bike path underneath the King William Bridge, situated in Elders Park in the center of Adelaide.

The underpass is about 40 m (130 ft) long and 9 m (30 ft) wide with 9 arches. I wanted to work with the space in a similar way to what I did with trace at LIAF and Todays Art, constructing a grid of LED lines that animates and activates the structures of the space, in this case mainly the arches.

The unusual thing about this project for me was that it was a site-specific project where I didn´t have the possibillity to go there myself. I selected the location based on photos and created the setup based on drawings and an idea of how I wanted it to look. I prepared a detailed manual for the construction of the installation and the festival crew did a good job with the remote install.

This was obviously not an ideal situation, as for this type of work I am really interested in a more direct dialogue with the space, leaving room for improvisation and adjustements, and I quite enjoy the manual labour involved in building up installations. Also, not having been there myself makes the project less real somehow, especially since I like to emphasize the physical experience of my installations. That being said I was extremely lucky to get in touch with Paul Armour based in Adelaide who did a great job documenting the installation under difficult conditions. It gave me a chance to experience my own work the way most people do, through images and video published online.

One thing I discovered watching the video documentation was the fantastic soundtrack created by the cars passing over the bridge which I think worked really well with the motion of the light pulses.

in transit

My new light installation created for the 3rd floor of Woodstreet Galleries. It´s a 15m (50 ft) animated light installation running through the whole space.

portrait by Joey Kennedy. All rights reserved by joeykennedyphotography

blink @ woodstreet (Projected Light Space)

A version of blink made on site for Woodstreet Galleries.

More images from my Woodstreet Galleries exhibition

Woodstreet Galleries solo exhibition

I am showing 4 works over two floors at my first US solo exhibition at Woodstreet Galleries, which runs until April 8th.

On one floor I am showing three projection works: frame #2, circle #4 and blink@woodstreet. On another floor I am showing a new light installation, in transit (top picture) which is a 15 m animated light installation. To see more documentation (photo+video) follow the link to the different works.

The exhibition was supported by Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Fond for lyd og bilde, Bergen Kommune and Kontainerkorporation.

VPT 6 available: A projection powerpack

With almost 5000 downloads of VPT 5.1, I am happy to announce that the next version of Video Projection Tools, VPT 6 is now available.

VPT is a powerful and flexible video projection tool that does much more than just mapping.

What´s new in VPT 6.0
A completely new graphical interface making it even simpler to position, scale and distort the layers.
32 layers (previously 16)
mesh distortion with variable-sized control grid.
a completely rewritten cuelist making it even simpler to create transitions and to build complex sequences. You can now also send osc formatted commands directly from the cuelist.
crop-scaling of sources.
increased syphon support with two syphon (crop-scalable) inputs as well as syphon output support (mac only)
a DMX module has been added, with support for Enttecs usbdmx pro interface, enabling both control of VPT from DMX light consoles, or the possibillity to control dmx devices from VPT.

VPT still supports mac and windows, and it is still free. However, I have added the option for contributions through paypal:

VPT 6 is made possible through the support of IMAL in Brussels and Atelier Nord in Oslo.

IMAL offered me a one month residency in april to give a VPT workshop and to do an exhibition.

Atelier Nord has supported me twice this year: First they hosted a workshop as part of Oslo Lux in January which ended up in a VPT 5.1 release, and in june they gave me a week residency to write documentation for VPT 5.5 which instead turned into intense development of VPT 6.

So hosting workshops and inviting me to residencies is another way of supporting my work.

Read more about VPT 6 and try it out

Two new works

I have made two new works for my exhibition at IMAL, which is my first solo show in Belgium (29.04-22.05.2011).

As in my recent installations blink and split I am interested in relating directly to the architecture of the exhibition space. The main IMAL space is about 200m2 with a grid of 12 columns.  The circular discs are freestanding sound modules (five in total) placed on the floor. A slowly-paced sequence of projection and sound transforms the space into a contemplative environment.

The other installation explores through projection,light and reflection the inside,outside and perimeter of a circle mounted at a 90 degree angle to the floor. This is a first in a series of work creating dynamic volumes out of precisely cut flat shapes (in this case using a cnc mill).

For more images (also in print quality) from both installations take a look at my flickr set from the exhibition.

Results from openLAB exhibition at IMAL

openLAB exhibition – Quentin Gubin, Luz Diaz & Filip Daniels (BE) : Zoning en suspension, originally uploaded by iMAL.org.

In beginning of April IMAL hosted an openLAB workshop called “Projections on forms and spaces”.
The workshop was led by me and was mainly based on using VPT. We selected 7 projects to be realised during one week development at IMAL, and the documentation is now available from IMAL.

It was an intense and interesting week, and interesting to see VPT explored for new uses in installation and performances. A new development for me was to introduce a simple video and audio trigger setup (available in the xtension section), which allowed for some audience interaction, as well as use of the serial module for controlling lights inside sculptures.

Light on White at Oslo Lux

Last week the symposium Oslo Lux took place at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo, organized by Anthony Rowe and Ståle Stenslie.

It was a one day event with speakers from art, architecture and design discussing uses of light in different projects. I spoke at the seminar, created a snow projection and gave a 2 days VPT workshop so it was a very intense but interesting week.

The keynote speakers were AntiVJ and UVA. The list of speakers  also included Timo Arnall who had a very interesting talk on light painting, presenting work of people which I felt I should have know about already (Gjon Mili, Michael Weseley, Eric Staller). His second topic about visualizing the RFID and wifi networks range was also interesting. In fact the mix of speakers and topics made the day go by really fast!

I went to a separate event at Atelier Nord earlier in the week where Joanie and Simon from AntiVJ gave a 2 hour enthusiastic talk about their work. They were very excited about real-time software, and it reminded me a bit of the same energy which I experienced ten years ago with realtime video software like Imagine, nato and jitter.

White on Light video:

I was part of the exhibition and decided to do an outdoor snow projection. Unlike my previous attempts on working with snow I decided to not try to build anything with the snow, but instead cut out a piece of snow and work with the top curvy surfaces and the edges. It seems I am unable to make anything but slow meditative pieces nowadays, but the result wasn´t that bad, really.

More images from the projection at flickr.

The two day VPT workshop at Atelier Nord was fun, a very focused and eager-to-learn group, and several of the participants have already started doing their own projects with the software, which is exciting.

Fuglane-behind the scenes

I have uploaded some images from the process of constructing the landscape for the Fuglane scenography, you can see it here as a slideshow.

I started off with a plastelina model (which I don´t feel like sharing with the world), and then continued with a google sketchup 3D model.  I  then got the model milled in styrofoam to use as the presentation model of the scenography. Later the 3d model was converted into technical drawings used by the skilled carpenters at the theatre to build a full scale version (about 10mx7m, the highest top about 1.6m). It was then covered by a material to make it more suitable as a projection surface.

I used a total of 4 projectors, two from above, one frontal, and one for the back wall. I used two macminis with matrox dualhead- to-go splitters and a customised version of my projection software VPT (not unlike the upcoming release).
Everything was controlled from the lighting console of the theatre, using an enttec dmx usb pro interface combined with Olaf Matthes excellent max externals.

snitt

On November 13th my second solo exhibition at Galleri 21 in Malmö opened, and it runs until December 5th.

I created two site-specific installations, which both derive from recent work, investigating the relation between light/projection/shadow,space and movement.

At the moment I only have decent documentation of one of the works, so I will just briefly mention “Kaos på dej”, which is basically a variation of the blink (light/shadow) installation but with some furniture.

Snitt, which spanned over three rooms in the gallery, is a projection of a white line onto the surfaces of the gallery: “A straight line moves slowly through the three rooms of the gallery space, cutting the space into different sections (snitt). The movement of the line, “attacking” the space from different angles, focus the attention of the viewer on the physical qualities of the space.

The physical properties of the galllery space (the walls, ceiling,floor, door openings, light fixtures etc) modulates/breaks up the straight line into a continuously evolving pattern of line fragments, depending on the position of the viewer and the angle of the line in relation to the architecture.”

The view in the inner room:

And here is a video showing some of possible configurations of line-space.

If you still want to see more, here is a slideshow.