It hasn’t been more than three years since Pablo Valbuena presented his Augmented Sculpture works to the public – One the first projection mapping projects to gain such high popularity.
Ever since, many artists and projects have come to light using projection mapping techniques. From small abstract sculptures to high rise buildings, everything has been a canvas for artists to project light onto. Of course making architectural size projections doesn’t come with a small budget.
Questions arise about the future of projection mapping. Will it be a techinque to challenge the audience with augmented reality and a new perception of architecture or will it turn the city buildings into huge advertisements?
No matter what capitalism has to say about that, it was a main issue on the discussion at onedotzero, paneled by some of the leading men in the projection mapping area.
Ben Fender from Drive Productions. Drive productions with experience on event production made a big fuss with the 4d Ralph Lauren projection mapping. A huge projection containing everything from architectural motion graphics to green screen shooting of horsemen, made a new reference on how projection mapping can be used for advertisement.
Many big projects followed including a projection on a car for Bentley, to the latest Nokia production on the Millbank Tower marking one of the biggest events to happen in London.
Evan Grant founder of the Seeper company. Seeper made their way into projection mapping after a big success of the Battle of Branchage projection on Mont Orgueil CastleMon. Seeper has now numbered a great number of projection mapping projects such as the Vimeo awards projection and the Lightline of Gotham projection at the Frank Gehry building comissioned by Honda. Seeper goes beyond projection mapping to a lot of research on arts and technology and managed to bring interactivity on projection mapping on a few occasions such as the Kinect Launch Party.
Joanie Lemercier co-founder of the antivj group.The antivj crew is one of the leading groups on the artistic side of projection mapping and was there at the very beginning of things. Mr Lemercier presented his first home made experimentations with projection mapping up until the Grote Kerk projection on the cathedral of Breda, and the very narrative approach on the Desherence project.
The antivj experimentaions on human perception of light lead to some very challenging for the audience artworks such as the EYJAFJALLAJOKULL installation on last years onedotzero.
Last was the representative from Russian Visual Artists. Providing some great insights on the Russian event market. Included in their portfolio a large scale video production in Voronesh,
an interesting in theater production in Pashkov house
and a car projection made from the inside out.
Some interesting ideas from this new company on the market – the only one on the panel outside of Europe.
“Is this a trendy trick or are there deeper creative values on this medium?” says the onedotzero invitation.
Nowadays many new softwares exist for everyone to experiment with this medium. It will sure be interesting to see what the future holds for this emerging technique. From interactive games played on buildings, to projections on moving objects, to augmented reality installations its all the hands of new media artists to define the next day for projection mapping.
