World’s Unfair Ball

Creative Director
The Music Box, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 2, 2018
Funded by the School of Visual Arts (SOVA) at Virginia Tech

The SOVA Projection Mapping Project was presented at the Krewe’s World’s Unfair ball, a full-scale physical space where “extremely loose interpretations” of the 1984 World’s Fair sites are displayed by various invited artists with over 1200 visitors in attendance. My spring semester projection mapping class was invited by an event organizer to put together a projection mapping piece in less than two weeks including animation, rendering and fabrication of the tetrahedron form to project on. As creative director, I taught the class how to use the software package Pepakura to unravel a 3D triangle into an unfolded pattern drawing like a 3D puzzle form. Using a projector, we took the template and traced the lines onto poster board in order to create 3D triangles. The individual triangle forms were then cut, folded and taped together the night before with simple poster board in order to keep the structure light and mobile enough to travel in a car. The individual triangles were assembled in less than four hours and then the overall final shape was put together in three hours. We used a simple Benq projector at the live event and mapped the surface using MadMapper. I helped direct each student from the class in creating a 20 to 30 second animation to project onto the surface. The videos were all played during the four-hour performance at the Ball. Attendees at the Ball danced, took photos and interacted with the piece in a variety of ways.

This piece came from an idea I had while meditating where I envisioned abstract forms.

Collaborators: Rachel Weaver (Co-Director and Co-Event Coordinator), Carter Eggleston, (Construction Crew), Heather Arnold (Animator), Jesse Bibel (Animator), Zachary Ryan Cortez (Animator), Justus Darby (Animator), Nishat Jamil (Animator), Antonia Cadence Marigliani (Animator), Pei Qiu (Animator), Michael Rhoades (Animator), Yiming Wang (Animator), Armi Behzad (Animator), David J Franusich (Animator), Mahshid Gorjian (Animator), Tacie Nicole Jones (Animator), Xindi Liu (Animator), Daniel Monzel (Animator) and Huy Quoc Ngo (Animator)

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