Bright Night Out

Joe Crossley: joecrossley.com
Finely Tuned (Producer): finelytuned.com.au
Epson: www.epson.com.au

TRANSCENDING TRAGEDY

The striking centrepiece of Vivid in Martin Place was designed to cast light in a space associated with tragedy following the Lindt Café seige in December. Transcendence, designed by Sydney-based new media artist and Finely Tuned director Joe Crossley, combined projection-mapping with code-driven light shows on three-storey high bamboo scaffolding covered with screens – which doubled as pop-up hawkers’ food bazaar.

The visuals were a collaboration between Crossley and a roster of artists from Australia, New York and the UK, using 10 Epson projectors from a home-made media server using Resolume software, with Mad Mapper video mapping software for the ‘bamboo mapping’. Such was its success, the project led to Epson sponsoring both Crossley and Transcendence.

His equipment requirements were very specific: “I wanted very bright, sharp, vivid, large venue projectors that were easy to set up and adjust to get the exact look and effect I was after. Having looked at other projectors on the market it became clear that the best ones for this installation were the Epson G and Z Series. The colours these projectors produce are way brighter than any other projector I’ve seen. The keystone correction was amazing and really allows you to get exactly what you want.

“Transcendence was a complex installation and the fact that we could move the images remotely and that they would morph the way we wanted them to was a massive plus. It also means we could manipulate the images and use every centimeter of surface space without losing a single pixel.

“The Epson projectors have quick corners, meaning we can quickly line up the images and adjust them remotely. In an installation such as Transcendence it’s all about the brightness of the projectors and the Epson projectors really delivered here. They also excelled in the luminosity of every colour and just knowing you always have those 5000 lumens is amazing.” (Photo: Joe Crossley at the Transcendence installation in Martin Place, Sydney)

Holly: www.hol.ly

TAKING FLIGHT

Part of Vivid’s Light Walk, Space Folding by digital agency Holly’s Zina Kaye, was a towering walk-in cylinder that morphed into multi-coloured patterns of light and sound in response to real-time flight data from Sydney airspace. The installation mapped the progress of planes flying in and out of the airport, allowing audiences to follow their progress through the rhythmic movements of colour and data racing around the structure, with headsets to hear the data-driven generated soundtrack.

The 3m tower was wrapped with more than 1600 LEDs with custom-built software to translate the live flight data into unique patterns of light and sound, prompting questions and discussions about place, transformation and the interconnected nature of our world — well, if you’re a beret and cravat wearer at least. As explained by Holly producer Danielle Wiessner, it offered arguably a unique convergence of light and sound, in the way that it combined live flight data, new code technologies, an audio streaming service, game sound design principles and immersive audio technologies: “In the end, we were able to create an extraordinarily immersive auditory experience, utilising an array of sophisticated techniques that at the same time provided a sense of narrative, emotion, evolution and energy for both the light sculpture and the audience to engage with,” she said.

The musical work was broken down into a series of assets that were manipulated and orchestrated via MaxMSP interactive installation software, Wiessner explained, and programmed using audio coding technology more commonly seen in large-scale video game titles to synchronise it to the data set, which in turn synchronised with the light sculpture.

In total, 1168 individual sound assets were recorded, edited, designed and implemented into a customised audio system using MaxMSP. Recording the raw audio was done over two days at Linear Studios and featured musicians including Sydney’s highly regarded Jared Underwood and Llew Kiek. Dozens of instruments recorded note by note so they could be selectively triggered by the lights, among them ancient Arabic and Mediterranean stringed instruments, African djembe, Asian singing bowls, traditional western instruments including piano and glockenspiel.

“Importantly, the recordings were made using a process known as ‘binaural’, which recreates the responses of the human ears when positioning sound in a three-dimensional space,” Wiessner said. “As the musicians played each note they changed their position in relation to the microphone. As the sounds are randomly selected they appear to change position around the listener. The realism of this spatial positioning technique creates a heightened experience that, in the resulting work, was both natural and otherworldly.”