W2 - MoMA + Dillon Francis + Madmapper
This week’s show blog includes several small pieces and moments from my trip to MoMA and a concert I went to at Avant Gardener.
Dillon Francis Concert at Avant Gardener
The show was ok, but there were two moments that I was amazed by the visual and lighting design.
In the video below, you can see the visual in the background was a 3D scene with purple and green lights. And the lights on the stage match with the lights in the virtual scene perfectly. This is a perfect example of bringing the virtual world into reality and combining them cleverly. The best part was when the purple lights on the stage started flashing, the light in the video flashed as well, and virtual lighting in the 3D render lighted up all the virtual objects in the video just like the stage lights could shine through the screen.
The second moment was another excellent example of light working with visuals as an extension of the screen.
The visual in the screen was fire sparks getting more and more intense following the music beats. As the white sparks got more substantial, the stage's flashlights started firing off. Then followed by yellow and orange spotlight, fire in the screen felt like coming out of the screen and filling up the entire stage. It gave me a powerful and satisfying visual effect.
MoMA
I went to MoMA on Sunday and spent hours in the museum. I found two pieces of work fascinating.
The first one is a projection work by Paul Chan. The title is 1st Light
Paul Chan placed the projector above the ground and angled it down to create a tapered rectangular projection on the floor. This piece mimics the light that shines through a window, casting a shadow on the floor. The content in the projection is all the shadow cast by the objects outside the window. The execution is straightforward, but because of the projector's angle and the street light shadow, it is very realistic in a sense.
My favorite moment with this piece was when two little girls came and started playing with their own shadow in the projection while all the adults, including me, were standing far away. This reminds me of Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works in conversation at Pioneer Works. One of the speakers mentioned kids were going into the lights, playing with the art, while all the grown-ups only observed from a distance. The room was empty, and there were no obstacles nor warning of no touching. But somehow, we are afraid of interrupting the art; even it's are just a projection on the floor.
The second piece I enjoyed was Marta Minujín’s MINUCODE. It is a silent 4-minute six-channel video transferred from 16mm film. Again, the entire room was empty, but videos shot from different social event angels covered all the walls. It was not a seamless projection that stitched all the frames together, so they felt more like surveillance camera footage. And since no one in the video looked into the lens, I thought I was observing the crowd from a safe environment.
Madmapper: Map on Mask
I did one mapping with individual shapes of quad, line, and triangles.
I also managed to create a mask with the 3D file.
