The Spirit of Weimar

Weimar is a little city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. Despite its population of just about 65 000 people, the cities’ cultural heritage is vast and the history can be traced back to 889. In the 18-19th centuries it was an important cultural centre of Europe and has been home to Goethe, Schiller, Liszt and Bach. Bauhaus School and movement were established in Weimar in 1919.
Now, a new videomapping event takes place here and looks beyond the mere geometry of objects to explore the possibilities of reflecting the spirt of the place.

Genius Loci Weimar is an exciting international festival for multimedia facade projections and site-specific audiovisual performances. Unlike erratic claptrap, Genius Loci Weimar approach focuses on an intensive analysis of history, habitat and the architectonical composition of the place.
This focus is easy to explain: the festival founders Stefan Kraus and Hendrik Wendler are addicted to video and architecture and like the mix of history and possibilities of projection mapping to tell new stories in such cultural context.

Stefan Kraus is a media artist and together with Baha Hamdemir they form a VJ art group “MXZEHN – 25 Masterpieces per second” since more then 10 years. With Genius Loci Weimar he wanted to create a festival, where he really would love to play and create art of projection without commercial pressure. Hendrik Wendler is the creator of “MXWendler FXServer and Stage Designer“. Since 2004 his software makes amazing and impressing projection setups possible in theaters, clubs and – of course – on facades. They met at Bauhaus University in Weimar, where they studied architecture in the 90s and have created Genius Loci Weimar as a festival, where international projection artists could tell the story of the place on site and meet other VJ and projection artists.

Stefan and Hendrik organize Genius Loci Weimar 2013 together with 4 team members experienced in theatre, architecture, media and urban design, culture management and urban culture. The events’ symposium and the Genius Loci Club are curated in cooperation with local partners like Bauhaus University and the Gaswerk – a trendy subcultural cultural spot in the classical city.

The festival was launched in 2012 and became an immediate success. The artists come in touch with the festival via the competition. Together with the local cultural network Genius Loci Weimar offered a nice cultural mix between Goethe´s classic and contemporary art. The first projection location was Fürstenhaus, which houses the main building of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music.
Nerdworking’s international team consisted of nearly 20 artists and created an incredible historical fairytale “Under an Alias” that shows the multicultural setting of Weimar’s spirit in the past and in the presence. It won the last year’s competition.

Besides the work of the award winners, other works of well-known international projection artists such as VJ Fader (USA), Dirk Rauscher (G), RDV Collectif (FR) and MXZEHN (G) were presented together with talented musicians and local artists at the building and later in the Genius Loci Club. The local feedback from the inhabitants, Weimar’s mayor and the media was great and this year the festival is embedded officially in a touristic campaign called “Weimarer Sommer” and many tourists and spectators coming specifically for the event are expected.

2013 will mark the expansion of Genius Loci Weimar in time and space: three historic facades will be animated. The festival is being expanded to include a program with competition, symposium, workshops and exhibition in cooperation with the Bauhaus University Weimar, “Weimarer Sommer” and MXWendler.

Audiovisual Academy is proud to be selected as one of the festival’s partners and we will be covering this year’s competition and event in our blog and in social networks.

The competition 2013
Genius Loci Weimar seeks for innovative ideas for the facade-projection festival held from 5th-11th August 2013.
Until the 15th of April, participants apply with a 30 sec videoclip explaining the main design concept for one of the facades of the historical buildings: Wittumspalais, City Castle Courtyard, Main-Building Bauhaus University. The three winning artists will be awarded a totaling prize money of 45 000 Euros to create a 10-15 min long high-resolution audio-visual production, which can be presented in the form of video mapping on the respective facades on the evenings of 9th-11th August.

The most important requirements for the Genius Loci Weimar competition are:
• An innovative design in the form of an audio-visual video mapping, with particular observance paid to the Genius Loci.
• An individual, original and sophisticated handling of the spirit of the location with respect to the history and architecture.
• The deliberate omission of erratic gimmickry and showmanship, intrusive clichés, and careless historical retelling.

Read all about the competition and this year’s festival, here:
http://www.genius-loci-weimar.org/program/
http://www.genius-loci-weimar.org/competition/

Get in touch:

Stay tuned!
We would like to thank Maxi Kretzschmar, one of the Genius Loci Weimar 2013 committee members for the contribution of this article and all her invaluable help.

Audiovisual Academy, 07mar
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AUDIO VISUAL DIGEST #13

Our selection of videos on the web that we liked.

Jamie Lidell, You Naked – Flat-e

A new video for the latest Lidell’s track ‘You Naked’. A mix of funk, soul and electro with broken beats that remind us of Prince and David Bowie and amazing light design combined with video mapping – although it’s used quite often these days, it looks very fresh here. Back to the Future – that says it all!

flat-e.com

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Stardust – PostPanic

A new CG film by PostPanic studio about ‘Voyager-1′, which was launched by NASA back in 1977 to do research in the remote parts of the Solar System.
It has it all – fantastic space views, a planet dying out, the feel of loneliness… A truly beautiful work with a deep philosophical concept by a Dutch studio was created in memory of their colleague who recently lost his fight with cancer.

postpanic.com

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The Future – Alex Goddard

How do you imagine the future? When we think about it, we naturally come up with flying devices, skateboards and robots. But even the boldest of futurologists wouldn’t be able to make this up… Imagine flying Lara Croft, toilet, socks, and even a toast with Jesus’s portrait. A humorous future envisioned by a young British animator and movie director Alex Goddard.

vimeo.com/goddardmakes

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Kenzo – Electric Jungle

For the promo of his latest stunning Resort collection Kenzo have chosen as an art director a movie director and artist from London Mat Maitland – a prominent specialist in creating audiovisual eclectic, who previously collaborated with Beck and Michael Jackson. Will you pass the acid test?

matmaitland.com

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Pariah, Signal Loss – V.A.

A very interesting and technically advanced video project was created by students from Köln International School of Design and, in our opinion, lays the foundation for new aesthetics.
This work employed a Kinect camera coupled with ReconstructMe to scan the human body. Later on, a character from the video was simulated with MoCap-Data.
Despite this, the video itself looks very simple, stylized in lo-fi so much that it hard to believe that it took one week of render on 8 powerful computers for the final project.
Combined with the beautiful melancholic track by Pariah, it creates an experiment very pleasant to viewers’ eyes and ears.

vimeo.com/hanneshummel

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Lego Dance – Annette Jung

The clip lasts only 29 seconds, but it worth every second of it. A great example of stop-motion animation by Annette Jung of Berlin studio Talking Animals.
Curiously, the studio was founded and maintained by the people who went to the same school class.

vimeo.com/talkinganimals

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New York Biotopes – Lena Steinkühler

Another student work by Lena Steinkühler which explores the idea of a possible parallel reality in which New York undergoes metamorphoses with help of ‘biotopes’ (abstract plants and animals), intelligent mechanisms evolving through mimicry in urban environment.

square-design.net

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Audiovisual Academy, 01mar
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Audiovisual Academy at ISE 2013

This year, our first business trip was to Amsterdam, which for the seventh time hosted a major international sound and video equipment tradeshow named Integrated Systems Europe (ISE).

One of our colleagues Russian Visual Artists’ producer Nelly Kareva traveled there to attend the show.

Traditionally, some of the largest professional equipment vendors showcase their latest products and demonstrate recent developments at ISE private screenings; meanwhile engineers from China keep changing their camera batteries several times during the day. Each year, the exhibition introduces products that will soon be used not only by professional integrators, but by media artists around the world as well.

This year, for our review we picked few trends, which deserve particular attention. Every year the expo expands, occupying more space while the organizers experiment with new timetables. It is caused by the growing number of visitors despite the fact that this is quite a specialized industry market unlike car shows that target general public. Last year, in three days around 40,000 people attended the tradeshow. And it’s almost impossible for one person involved in the industry to check out all pavilions or at least look through the stands of all companies.

Most part of our review will be dedicated to display technologies, which is more popular among wide audience. Besides, a brand new display is something more spectacular than a brand new commuting box with connectors.

First of all, we were surprised to see such a huge number of transparent LCD-matrix based solutions. Considering the fact that the first pre-production prototype by Samsung was showcased only two years ago at CeBIT, this technology rapidly became very popular. Numerous solutions: from retail products to museum windows – were presented by big manufacturers (Samsung, LG), as well as by small companies which offered products based on different display technologies.

For the first time, the expo featured a stand from RealFiction, the pioneer in serial production of Dreamoc 3D Pyramid. Their product premiered in 2009 at the stand of their distributor in Europe. After its debut, similar devices appeared in Europe and Russia. It seems that the industry people got a bit bored with this technology couple of years ago but still general public is unfamiliar with it. That’s why this solution is still a popular choice for multimedia ad campaigns and widely used in museum installations. By the way, we used a similar device in our recent project for Gillette.

Besides RealFiction, HoloCube and Space3D also introduced other devices with such technology. Due to competition, manufacturers are forced to add new features to their products. Space3D presented a gesture-controlled pyramid. They use Asus Xtion, which is similar to Microsoft Kinect in specs, but cheaper and more compact.

These days, interactivity features are being added into almost all spheres and devices. Christie demonstrated a multitouch solution for their super-popular MicroTiles LED cubes. Their solution is based on simple IR frames, which are produced, by PQ Labs, Lumio, and lots of other companies.

They also presented a ready-made solution by adding interactivity to MicroTiles: a multitouch catalog that allows you to view models, a shopping cart feature etc.

Despite the fact that the IR frame technology is used by numerous interactive display producers (Ideum, uTouch, PQ Labs), it has some serious drawbacks. First, they are very sensitive to surrounding light. Second, display glass surface that is used for touch interaction in most cases not covered with gloss finishing that reduces touch resistance and lowers screen greasing. As a results, working on them is somewhat not easy and the surface can be quite dirty.

‘Projected Capacitive’ technology that was first applied to iPhone in 2007 is much more attractive and user friendly and is now found on most smartphone screens. Each year, 3M increases size of the produced display for the tradeshow. This year in Amsterdam they showcased a new 32” display, which is great but slightly disappointing as just a month prior to that an 84” prototype was demonstrated in Las Vegas. In any case, their displays seem to be the best in the industry. And it’s not just product specs stating a 40-touch support and 10 ms response time. It’s the feel. To put it simply, they are almost perfect and reminded us of Apple products.

Another company that introduced solutions similar in both technology and quality at ISE was a British company Zytronic.

We should also mention growth of the market of projectors with hybrid light sources. A couple of years ago, Casio projectors based on hybrid laser-LED light source were the only solution. This year BenQ started mass-production of non-bulb projectors. Their products are traditionally known for low prices and can be recommended as a good technical solution for media installations.

It’s always great to see some new and unique concepts. This time we were impressed by an LED screen from a major European supplier of display solutions (both for rent and retail) – Lang AG. They demonstrated an LED screen with 1.9 mm pixel pitch, which is the lowest number in the industry so far. It is really impressive. You can see that this super-bright display consists of numerous LEDs only from a half-meter distance.

A German company Tridelity introduced a great autostereoscopic screen. Such displays are based on the concept similar to that we remember from childhood: transforming images that were used with lenticular plastic. From a certain distance you can really see a clear 3d image on the big screen without glasses.

The purpose of this trip was to gather information about the latest products and technologies that we can use in our works, research and projects. We wanted to tell you in brief about the most interesting and memorable ones. Besides, we met many interesting people from new areas who may become involved in the Audiovisual Academy web educational activities in the future. Follow our news updates and sign up for newsletters – some interesting announcements and events are coming soon

Audiovisual Academy, 18fév
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