Note:
You can watch the video at the top of this post to see how I made this project and how it turned out. You’ll have to excuse my much thicker Australian accent; I was still living Down Under at the time, and I sound a little different these days after over a decade in the US. At least there’s no Olympic breakdancing in the video.
I’ve visited two life-altering projection art exhibitions recently—one at Mercer Labs here in Lower Manhattan that’s absolutely worth the trek downtown, and an even more mind-blowing installation in Tokyo called Borderless by a group called Teamlab.
Picture the villain in that Spider-Man film where drones use projectors to create entire immersive worlds out of nothing, and you’ve basically got Borderless. The Japanese, unsurprisingly, have mastered the art of making you question whether you accidentally ingested something hallucinogenic on your way through the door.
The technology today is staggering. Artists paint with light the way Michelangelo carved marble, except no one’s getting carpal tunnel from a chisel. I wandered through digital waterfalls that responded to my movements, thinking about how twelve years ago, when I was still in Melbourne, projectors were basically glorified slide machines with the ambition of a government employee on a Friday afternoon.
Back in 2011, while New York was still a distant dream involving roaches larger than the rodents in my apartment building, I accidentally became the “projection designer” for an experimental theater production in Melbourne. A generous title, considering my qualifications consisted of “can draw things” and “knows how to Google technical problems without crying.”
The Kin Collective, as they called themselves, was a troupe of eight alarmingly talented actors from various backgrounds—basically the Avengers, but of acting. I was their Jarvis: a disembodied voice backstage, trying to make technology behave while superheroes performed in front.
My task was deceptively simple:
Design a set for their debut show, Glimpse, without actually building anything physical.
Instead, I’d digitally draw and animate environments that would be projected behind the performers as they moved through vignettes developed using improvisation techniques from New York acting coach Larry Moss. (In Australia, casually name-dropping a New York coach gives you theatrical diplomatic immunity.)
Pitching the idea to the venue went about as well as you’d expect when saying, “We want to replace scenery with light.”
“So… no set?” the venue manager asked, looking at me like I’d proposed performing in the nude while juggling live ferrets.
“No, there’s a set,” I said. “It’s just… theoretical.”
The technical challenges began immediately. If performers stepped into the projector’s path, they’d suddenly have someone’s living room projected onto their faces—disorienting for everyone, unless you’re doing a show about human furniture (which, to be fair, is probably happening somewhere in Bushwick right now).
We spent days testing projectors and lenses, trying to find the maximum keystone angle (adjusting the tilt of the projector to avoid image distortion—a term I definitely didn’t panic-Google at midnight). Lighting designer Chris Chaney had the impossible job of blending stage lighting with projections so there were no harsh edges. It was like convincing cats and dogs to form a basketball team, but somehow he pulled it off. And I definitely didn’t just finish watching Air Bud before writing this...
My design philosophy was minimal: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” This stood in stark contrast to many digital artists today, whose mantra seems to be, “If the audience isn’t having a seizure, you haven’t used enough effects.”
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