The Depo is a hip and trendy bar located in West End, created and owned by some notable architect/designers. This venue commissioned a piece from me to cover a 2m x 2m area on site. This is a large projection mapping plus sculpture work designed around The Depo’s logo. Design and construction by me.
There were a few notable challenges with this piece that I want to mention here. The first was that this piece was commissioned to run every day for five weeks, but due to restrictions in the venue, could only be played via a DVD player connected to the venue’s static projector. Thus, while the piece needed to look mapped and line up correctly to my sculpture, it had to be a simple video file, burnable to DVD, and able to easily play and stop without changes in resolution or keystoning (not much fun when the Macbook Pro does not have a DVD drive anymore). The second challenge was the time frame in which I had to create the work, which was, from the first time I met with the venue manager and looked at the projector set up, 1.2 weeks to create and install, including the construction of the entire sculpture. In order to get the projection to line up based on the DVD, I decided to create the sculpture around the output, rather than map the output to the sculpture. This certainly tested my mathematics skills when creating my triangles. The third challenge was one I am used to – installing without damage to the venue, considering my works of this nature are meant to be mounted on walls. The wall in this venue was large cement brick with no wall mounts, as this wall is not customised for artwork. I chose to use very lightweight structures stuck to the wall simply with blu-tac, and I visited the venue once in a while to check they were sticking well. Other options are velcro or double-sided tape, but I’ve always found that blu-tac works just as well, if not better. All challenges were met, though the final resolution seen through the DVD player was less than desired, but to be fair this was an unusual set up.
Very pleased with the outcome and my time-management skills on this piece. *self high five*.
Pictures and documentation to come.