For the light artist presentation, I will be covering URBANSCREEN: “an internationally active design-studio for cross-disciplinary media installations” (urbanscreen.com). This collective of artists is responsible for a wide variety of commissioned light-based artworks, primarily focused on projection mapping on large spaces.
I decided to highlight a few of their works that I thought best highlight their process and range of applications.
Cross Hatch
Cross Hatch is one of URBANSCREEN’s larger projections, spanning across the surfaces of the European Central Bank seat in Frankfurt, Germany. Colorful and fantastical illustrations unfold and shift all over the building, creating an awe-inspiring display.
In Nemo
In Nemo is a much smaller work at the Busan Cinema Center in Busan, South Korea, with a very different mood. Two people appear to be trapped in a box, and gradually shift themselves around in the cramped space – creating an odd and haunting, yet beautiful set of motions. Superimposed on this video are layers of red and gray geometric shapes, mimicking the style of the building it is projected on.
Lighting the Sails
This is another example of URBANSCREEN’s capacity for extremely large installations, this time across the roof of the world-famous Sydney Opera House. In this clip, URBANSCREEN has projected cloth ripples onto the roof, calling back to the fact that the Opera House’s roof was inspired by ships’ sails.
Die Wundermaschine (The Magic/Wonder Machine)
Installed inside a former natural gas storage tank in Wuppertal, Germany, Die Wundermaschine is unique in that it creates a 360° projection. The tank’s cylindrical interior is transformed into a massive, colorful machine that calls back to the industrial history of the region.
Night of the Challenger
Night of the Challenger was commissioned for Caterpillar, the heavy machinery company, to unveil their newest generation of vehicles in 2017. This work is notable because it is far from urban – in fact, the projections in Night of the Challenger were cast across a vast dirt lot that Caterpillar uses for demonstrations.
I also highlighted this installation for some of its behind-the-scenes footage, which shows how they calibrate the projections.
If you are familiar with 3D modelling, you might think of this as a UV map for the physical landscape – by projecting a grid onto the terrain, the engineers working on this can adjust the image until all the edges are visually intact. These changes can then be applied to the real visuals later.
Sources:
https://www.urbanscreen.com/
https://andreaspreis.com/luminale-2018
http://thecreatorsproject2.vice.com/blog/projection-mapping-surreal-dance-performance-korean-facade
https://der-gaskessel.de/
Provided YouTube videos