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In class on Wednesday, Dr. Sample mentioned how in The Lumière Brothers’ film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), the audience was afraid and ran out of the theater because they thought the train was coming towards them. This reminded me of Urban Projection Mapping – or projecting film onto buildings – which has a similar effect on the modern audience as the train did in 1895. Projection Mapping presents this same concept of something very recognizable and realistic presented through technology, but is affected by the technology in a way that is scary for the viewer. This article on The Coolist provides ten excellent examples of this, but the video below is specifically unnerving.
This is the Beurs van Berlage building in Amsterdam and is an advertisement for Samsung, who hired NuFormer to create the video, which shows the building being destroyed and overtaken by wildlife. The unsettling part is how it starts with the normal look of the building, and then you hear the crack of the foundation and it breaks down right in front of you, as if experiencing an earthquake.
Another video from that website has a similar disturbing effect, but the building is not destroyed – rather it is built.
This projection took place on the Aeroport nightclub at the 44th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In this piece, you get three different architectural versions of the building. The one that looks most like a raw blueprint is most unnerving because it is as if the viewer can see through the building and can see the skeleton of it.
Since Carolyn Marvin’s chapter talked a lot about society’s fears of technology, I was going to ask if projects like these cause any modern fears? But I feel like this kind of art causes more fascination. Maybe that’s because we are desensitized by technology now? Today, do we still experience that “any hint of technical complexity raise[s] doubt and suspicion” (77)? Marvin wrote that “essential markers of social distance were in danger, and that critical class distinctions could become unenforceable unless new markers of privacy and publicity could be established” (70). This is a public form of art, which furthers the deconstruction of classes because rather than paying to go to a museum, anyone on the street can watch. So while ‘electrical devices’ like the telephone affected communication between classes, art and film has pushed to reach all classes of people, not just the demographic that would go to a museum.
Bibliography
Macula, artist. Aeroport Mapping. Published by INITI.org. Vimeo, 2009.
NuFormer, artist. NuFormer, 3D Video Mapping (One Take) – Samsung, Amsterdam, the Netherlands – May 2010. Vimeo, May 2010.
Payne, Seamus. “When Buildings Come Alive: 10 Unreal Urban Projection Mapping Videos.” TheCoolist. 12 Nov. 2010.
Featured Image from Lighting Sibiu 2016 International videomapping competition, titled “Mapping Sibiu’s Main Square”
Posted from Intro to Digital Studies by Lauren C.