Archivi tag: Urban screen

SuperLux Smart Light Art, Design & Architecture for Cities by Davina Jackson
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SuperLux: Smart Light Art, Design and Architecture for Cities, edited by Davina Jackson, is the world’s first comprehensive monograph surveying recent milestones and triumphs using digital systems for lighting urban environments. The book’s three main pictorial sections focus on projects that use light to animate architecture and media screens, new forms of lighting in industrial zones and public areas, and interactive installations in urban spaces.

Its 272 pages include more than 400 images of post-2008 examples of energy-effective light installations – illuminated buildings, bridges, streets, parks, plazas, media walls, public interiors, water systems and gallery spaces, including interactions and augmented reality games using mobile devices.

Description

In recent years, new lighting technologies have been used to illuminate cities and towns in creative, energy-efficient ways. “Smart Light” is now a widely used term for the new technologies and ecological ideas that are transforming nighttime atmospheres and spectacular Smart Light festivals are awing audiences around the world.

Featuring more than 120 public artworks, design installations, and architectural elements, SuperLux is a visual celebration of the ingenuity and artistry of the latest lighting technology. The book’s three sections focus on projects that use light to animate architecture and media screens; new lighting in former industrial zones and new public areas, including wayfinding and street lighting; and interactive installations in urban spaces. Each is punctuated with essays by leading experts and designers on this remarkable new phenomenon.

As our public buildings, public spaces, and even homes become increasingly interactive, intelligent lighting design will become ever more relevant to our lives. SuperLux is an exciting introduction for designers, architects, artists, and anyone intrigued by the power of light.

Contributors

Davina Jackson

Author

Davina Jackson is a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College of Art, University of London, and former editor of Architecture Australia magazine. Her previous books include Next Wave: Emerging Talents in Australian Architecture.

The images and editorial texts are punctuated by guest essays from leading European scholars and light art designers, including Professor Peter Weibel (founder-director of the ZKM Media Arts Center), Professor Mary-Anne Kyriakou (founder of the first three Smart Light festivals), Dr Vesna Petresin (multimedia artist), Dr Thomas Schielke (curator and writer), and Professor Peter Droege (Chair of the World Renewable Energy Council).

Additional highlights of this timely volume are Dr Schielke’s Timeline of Luminous Structures since the 13th century, Professor Droege’s proposal for designers to subscribe to the SuperLux Code of Energy Conduct, European Space Agency photographs of cities at night from the International Space Station, and a list of notable city light festivals, approved by European festivals curator Bettina Catler-Pelz.

The book has been approved by UNESCO as a contribution to the United Nations’ 2015 International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.

SuperLux: Smart Light Art, Design and Architecture for Cities is published globally by Thames and Hudson, London, 2015, ISBN 9780500343043. Cover photograph (above) shows Mer-veille, a LED installation by Yann Kersalé, illuminating metal filigree screens around the new MuCEM building in Marseille, by architect Rudy Ricciotti. Photo Lisa Ricciotti/MuCEM.

The book’s Australian press release is here and the international press release is here.

IMAGO FLORIS Interactive video mapping performance by Urban screen
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IMAGO FLORIS is a collaboration project between URBANSCREEN, Stelzen-Art, Oakleaf and Raummaschine. Four creative collectives from Bremen teamed up to create a realtime kinetic mapping performance for the Fleurop-Interflora World Cup 2015. In this site-specific performance, three stilt walkers in floral-inspired, partly self-illuminating inflatable costumes become moving projection surfaces. With a little help of Kinect-based motion tracking, vivid graphic animations are mapped onto the performers while they move about the monumental hall freely.

Team URBANSCREEN:
Art director: Julian Hölscher
Dramatic adviser. Till Botterweck
Project Manager: Janna Schmidt

Team Stelzen-Art:
Art directors: Janine Jaeggi, Martin Sasse
Stilt- Performer: Janine Jaeggi
Technical manager: Martin Sasse
Costume: Light- Flower

Team Oakleaf:
Art director: Bettina Eichblatt
Stilt-performers: Bettina Eichblatt, Sabine Bechle
Technical manager: Piet Koenekoop
Costumes: Moon & Universe

Team Raummaschine:
Technical directors: Moritz Richartz, Simon Ulbricht, Hendrik Lüdders

Sound Composition: Beckmann (cinesong.de)

Documentation Director: Moritz Richartz

Stelzen-Art stelzen-art.de
Oakleaf Stelzenkunst oakleaf.eu
LZRK // Raummaschine raummaschine.com

IMAGO FLORIS is based on a performance concept by Raummaschine, Stelzen-Art and Oakleaf.

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Intervista a Urban screen su world-architects.com di John Hill
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Urban screen sono indubbiamente una delle società che ha sviluppato con migliori risultati di contenuto e di plasticità artistica visiva il videomapping declinandolo anche in teatro. Qua una nostra riflessione di alcuni anni fa.
Segnaliamo poi una bella e completa intervista al gruppo su world-architects.com. L’integrale è qua al link
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What is URBANSCREEN saying about architecture by creating “the optical illusion of physical transformations”? Is there any commentary embedded in the transformations?

The majority of our works are homages to the concept of the architect, emphasizing a building’s features and extending the perception of its construction. Every artistic method we decide to work with (film, dance, performance, sound, graphics) consistently derives from the architecture we are working on. This approach forms the core of our every production.

As for the use of optical illusion and physical transformation, our intentions offer a temporary shift in perspective, questioning and extending one’s habitual angle on urban space and its characteristic facades. Rather than embedding a commentary through altering the physical appearance of a building, we are aiming to establish an enhanced perception of its layers of construction by revealing a temporary flexibility of the otherwise static architecture.

KREISROT, “BAUHAUS celebrating 90th anniversary” (2009), on the Bauhaus Dessau designed by Walter Gropius
We perceive our stagings as analogous to natural phenomena located within the urban area, rather than as multimedia spectacles. The focus lies within offering a tangible experience of space and architecture.

Our intention is not to establish a direct form of communication that is explicitly addressing the visitor. An installation refers to the architecture and the surrounding space – its form of communication is centrifugal and therefore undirected. The staging takes place by means of the occurrence itself, shifting between experience and depiction in the form of its perception.

Due to the fragile, temporary character of projections, in combination with the physical presence of the architectural surface, an installation gains a very special appeal. On the one hand it embodies a monumental immediacy through its experience and interaction with passersby, while on the other hand its impermanence and elusiveness basically leave no tangible trace of existence.

The phenomenon only persists through afterimages, photographs, and films. The tangible trace of existence is one’s memory and involvement with the encounter. Analogous to the concept of the afterimage in optics, the staging’s persistence is a mental image emerging from the visitor’s interaction with the architecture.

The exploration of the contrasting effects of immediate, temporary, and continuous perception forms the basis of our approach to altering the physical appearance of architecture.

320° Licht by Urban screen
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320° LICHT

A spatial experience

320° Licht uses the cathedral-like beauty of the Gasometer Oberhausen as the starting point for a fascinating game with shapes and light. Within a radius of 320 degrees graphic patterns grow and change on the 100-metre high inside wall of the former gas holder.
The observer experiences the interplay between real and virtual space, in which the Gasometer seems to dissolve into its own, filigree structures and yet finally always reverts to its clear shape.

With approx. 20,000 square meters of area played upon, the installation is among the world’s largest and technically most sophisticated interior projections – interconnecting 21 powerful projectors to one projection screen.

‘320° Licht’ is part of the exhibition ‘The Appearance of Beauty’ – the variety of beauty in art that is shown inside the Gasometer from 11th April 2014 until 1st November 2015.
320° Licht is achieved with kind project support from Epson Germany.

Premiere: April 10th, 2014
Duration (loop): approx. 22 min.

Art Director: Thorsten Bauer, Max Görgen, Till Botterweck, Julian Hölscher
Creative Director: Thorsten Bauer
3D Supervisor: Peter Pflug
3D Designer: Till Botterweck
Music & Sound Design: Jonas Wiese
Project Manager: Majo Ussat

Documentation Director: Jonas Wiese
Camera: Thorbjörn Geisler
Slider Operator: Marcel Bueckner
Edit: Jonas Wiese
Grading: Thorbjörn Geisler

THX for providing REAL brillant services: Intermediate Engineering
Projection project partner: EPSON
3D Scan support: Leica Geosystems
Audio support: audioease
Media-Engine support: WINGS VIOSO
Fotos: Wolfgang Volz

 

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http://www.urbanscreen.com/320-licht-2/

 

Open Call: Temporary Urban Screen @Waterpieces Festival, Riga
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Call for Works - Temporary Urban Screen @Waterpieces Festival - Riga, Latvia 15­-17 August 2014.

http://screencitylab.net/projects/191-call-for-works.html

Screencity Lab is organizing a temporary urban screen in the context of Waterpieces Festival (Riga, Latvia 15-17 August 2014).

The idea is to collect short movies (live action / animation / video art) specifically intended to be screened in public spaces or shorts that have already been featured in any urban screen around the world. During the 2 days of the festival, Riga will have its first temporary urban screen, where the selected shorts will be screened in loop as a background both of the Waterpieces Festival and of the Riga City Festival 2014, the main annual event in Riga (in the program of Riga 2014 – European Capital of Culture)

Here is the call and entry form to take part in the program:
http://screencitylab.net/projects/191-call-for-works.html

Hypersurface and mediafaçade: URBAN SCREEN
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Pubblicato su Digimag

Lev Manovich once said that the deep change which is affecting culture in the era of computerized media revolution also concerns space and its representation and organization systems. Space becomes a media itself: just like all other media – audio, video, images and text – nowadays space can be transmitted, stored and recovered in a snapshot. Space can be squeezed, re-formatted, changed into a flow, filtered, computerized, programmed and interactively managed (L. Manovich, Il linguaggio dei nuovi media). Manovich also said that if all actions take place in a near future within the virtual and simulation space, the screen – which is the last appendix of frame perceived as divided physical space that prevent the observer to move – will completely disappear in favour of a shaded compositional effect which looks for “fluency and continuity”.

The virtual reality will reduce to a chip implanted in the retina and connected to the net through aether. From that moment on, we will bring with us our prison, not to happily confuse representations and perceptions (like in cinema), but to be always in contact, connected, linked. Retina and screen will end up being the same thing.

Screens have not been eliminated but rather widened. The main feature of scenes in the last years was in fact the phenomenon of gigantism. People speak about “hyper surfaces”, “interactive media facades” when referring to those permanent or temporal architectural walls, aimed at hosting bright and coloured surfaces, mega projections and plasma screens. Giant projections with images and writings are part of the metropolitan landscape and form the basic of advertisement equipment. Digital signage reach enormous and terraqueous formats (e.g. the 24 m advertising maxi screen put on an airship and visible from 4 km). The ultimate medialization of urban context is nearer than we believe and corresponds to the great dimensions of advertisements of the great distribution: megastores, supermarkets, fairs, non-places we go through and patronize everyday and which are the subject of Stefano Boeri and Vittorio Gregotti’s book – sponsored by Marc Augé – “La civiltà dei superluoghi” (The society of super places). According to Simone Arcagni, the experiential dimension of public space, squares, stations and undergrounds is linked to the more intimate, individual and television one through multidimensional schemes: “Media, city planning and performances concur to form a new spectatorial experience, which is partly also cinematographic” (“Il sole 24 ore on line”).

Urban architectures and large public spaces host special events, 3D video projections and led screens placed on building walls: urban screens, architectural mapping, facade projection, 3D projection mapping, video projection mapping, display surfaces, architectural Vj sets are only some of the words used in this field, which is called “Augmented Reality” (even if Lev Manovich prefers to speak about Augmented Space because there is an overlapping of electronic elements in a physical space). This is a technique that makes reality and its digital reproduction interact and modifies its visual perception overlapping it until it is totally twisted also in its dimensions.

Starting from these experiments of “augmented reality”, video works of art have been created in a “site specific” way and with great dimensions. Even theatre shows have been created with a virtual scenery/actor with 2 and 3D mapping and an absolutely real effect. This phenomenon is reaching wider and wider dimensions and an international diffusion, so that it has also been the topic of many international conferences organized by the International Urban screen association, as well as of various events (in Manchester and Amsterdam) and of specialized literature which can be completely downloaded from the website Networkcultures.org

For any further in-depth study, we suggest you to read the article online titled “Public space and the transformation of public space” and also the special edition on the Urban Screen published in the peer reviewed journal “First Monday”.

Important characters in this field are  Urban Screen, architects specialized in digital displays and installations, also in urban areas. They were born as group in 2008, but have been working in this sector since 2004 with headquarter in Bremen, Germany. They work in the field of entertainment, advertisement and show business using new digital medias and video projections. Open to cooperation with artists who work in the field of motion graphics and video, they created a new kind of public art, strictly digital. The artistic operation they inaugurate with techniques and programmes suitably created is an operation which foresees an accurate surface mapping (the question is right an exact homographic study) and the projection of a video or animated digital covering, perfectly shaped on the architectonical background. This creates extraordinary events and tridimensional effects, as much improbable as phantasmagorian.

The perception illusion, in the most successful cases is the illusion of a “liquid architecture” which adheres as a film or can be detached from the real surface. Particles of surfaces as Lego bricks try to create an optical illusion with a strong impact, everything under the eyes of an unaware public or people who do not distinguish between the real and the virtual architectonic frame. This technique has been immediately bought by great International brands for advertisements and the launch of new products. The technique lets make out also a possible performative digital use which would definitively combine video art, installations, graphic art, light design and live theatre.

House and church façades with single architectonic elements which break up, become moving pictures/paintings, enriched by light and colour stains that modify according to the music, digital characters climbing on windows, doors, roofs in this new medial and medial-performative art. The theatre borders have become wider and wider: the environment acts no more as background but as work of art itself.

Urban screen explains its work by saying: “Through our experience with scenery architecture we developed a procedure for projections adapted to surfaces and we created the socalled LUMENTEKTUR. Through the exact measurement, the projection was perfectly adapted to space. This allows having a direct point of reference and interaction with the background. Therefore, beside being a technical registered procedure, LUMENTEKTUR has also become an important approach to creative process. The overlapping of material structures with a virtual covering that completely covers them opens in fact the way to a creative potential that we are sistematically aiming at.

555 Kubik is maybe the media-façade event that made them more famous: architecture becomes a moving TASTIERA which a hand is layed on and follows the movement of. The architectonic feature of the building and the 3D projections contribute to the perception of an “augmented reality”. The application of this technique to theatre is also very interesting, since it creates an idea of hologram. The same happens in Goodbye in cooperation with the Bremer Theatre. In the same way, in Jump! the building façade becomes a sort of free climbing wall or circus arena for jumping and climbing actors who hide among the windows. In order to have a more specific idea of the many proposals in this field, please visit the videogallery of the channel I love mapping on the website Vimeo.com.

 Manovich – in one of his essays on this topic titled “The poetics of urban media surfaces”, dreams of a union between material and immaterial architecture: “Architects together with other artists could go a little bit forward and consider the ‘invisible’ space of electronic flows as a matter instead of a vacuum, i.e. as something which needs a structure, a politics, a poetics”.