Making Room for Wonder
This month, I share my inspiration from the Blink festival as well as my new mural projection!
My original intention with this month’s newsletter was to share the difficulties I’ve been wading through that I hadn’t covered in the last newsletter. When I sat down to pull everything together, though, I recognized that the unpleasant things that have happened only serve as an explanation as to why I haven’t been creating as much as I’d like to be. They don’t have any other connection to my artwork, so there’s no particular reason to go over them. (If you’d really like to hear about my accident and subsequent fight with my auto insurance company, however, send me a message and I’ll tell you all about it!)
The one positive thing that has happened in the past month, though, is most certainly connected to my artwork and I will happily share that, as well as a new projection that I just finished!
Blink is the country’s largest projection mapping and light installation festival and takes place in Cincinnati and parts of Kentucky. I saw an Instagram ad for it back in 2022 and have been planning to go ever since. It’s 4 nights long, from 7-11pm each night, and spans over 30 city blocks. It’s so expansive and requires so much planning that it only happens every two years.
Since I was going to be there all 4 nights, I ambitiously made the goal of seeing everything without fully understanding how the event worked. I learned that some of the projection sites were just one artist’s work with a video lasting on average between 3 and 6 minutes, while other sites were a series of videos from multiple artists playing back to back and lasting between 10 and 30 minutes.
Because the projections are on a constant loop, when you arrive to a spot it may already be halfway through, so you have to wait until it starts over again to see the whole thing. For the casual viewer this isn’t an issue. For someone who is trying to see 36 projections dispersed over 30 blocks with only 4 hours each night to do it, it’s challenging!
After taking the free park and ride bus the first night, I learned immediately that not only did the bus not get to the transit center drop-off as early as I wanted, but also that it was going to be really difficult to plan where I ended up at the end of each night in order to get back to the transit center in time to not miss the bus. Since seeing as much as I could was my top priority, I decided to just drive and pay for parking.
After the 2nd night I discovered that some of the light installations are set up and/or visible around 6:30pm so I could cross some of those off of my list before the projections started.
On the 3rd night I realized that despite a pretty solid effort, I wasn’t going to see everything because of how far away the Newport Zone in Kentucky was. (Scroll back up to see the map.)
With the size of the crowd, crossing the bridge into Kentucky took about 15-20 minutes. It would have taken about the same amount of time to get from the Covington Zone to the Newport Zone, and then I’d need to walk back to Cincinnati. (A lot of the streets are shut down, including the bridge, so walking is the best way to get around.) Overall it would have taken at least half the night if not more (with an hour of that time just walking) just to see the 3 projections and 3 light installations that were in the Newport Zone.
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All told, of the over 80 works of art, I missed 9 light installations and 3 projections and walked a little over 27 miles in 4 days. I took a ridiculous amount of photos and videos, and left incredibly inspired, enthusiastic, and very overwhelmed (but in a good way). I’m still going over the videos I took, analyzing them frame by frame like the Zapruder films. 😄
This past week I wandered my neighborhood, which is filled with murals, to look for a good practice candidate. Unfortunately a number of them are in difficult spots, with parked cars, power lines, or some other obstruction in the way, or they’re too large for my current set-up and would require two projectors to cover the whole mural.
The mural in the video below was my best bet. The only drawback is it’s on the side of a business so I have to wait for the business to close in order to not have parked cars obstructing it. This is my first attempt at a mural projection and I learned quite quickly that I don’t have much of an idea about how light interacts with the existing artwork. As always, white came across as very bright and black (or anything dark) disappeared, but colors that I thought would be very vibrant, like magenta, weren’t at all. There were other factors, like the distance of the projector and bright security lights, that contributed to how the animation looked.
With it being at or below 40 degrees at night now, practicing is going to get more difficult as I have to take the operating temperatures of all of my equipment into consideration. There are bags/cases available for my battery and laptop as well as DIY enclosure building plans for my projector that would allow them to be used in most weather conditions, but they’re not inexpensive options and also make the overall set-up less portable. Hopefully I’ll be able to work something out so I don’t have to hibernate for the winter!
As always, thank you so much for being here.
Until the next newsletter, be well!
Giesla
