Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence
For Städelschule Frankfurt, and in close cooperation with MESO, satis&fy had the opportunity to develop an interesting and ambitious architectural installation at the Portikus in Frankfurt. The Exhibition was on display between November 25, 2007 and January 13, 2008.
The exhibition, initiated and designed by the architect Ben van Berkel along with the architectural class of the Städelschule Frankfurt, was called “Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Imanence”. The centerpiece of this installation was a complex architectural structure called “The Thing.” “The Thing” divided the room into two levels. The upper level was used as a theatre-like forum while the lower level was used as an exhibition space for diverse projects made by the students.
For the crew at satis&fy, the technically-demanding part of this installation was projecting video onto the very complex surface of “The Thing’s” structure. The challenge was not only to create suitable content, but to realize the geometric correction of the projection onto a very uneven surface.
For the projection, four Panasonic PT-D5700 video projectors with short throw lenses (0.8:1) were hung from the four corners of the room. Content (created by MESO) was delivered by a high-performance computer system consisting of 4 render clients and one server. The software used on this system was VVVV, a multi-purpose toolkit for real-time video synthesis developed by the MESO Group. VVVV was used to generate the content as well as to process the geometric mapping. The projected images were not pre-produced as movies, but were generated and mapped onto the 3D-model in real-time.
Another feature of this installation, throughout this real-time rendering, was the visitors’ ability to influence the projection. Visitors to the exhibition space as well as external Internet users had the ability to simply drag points overlayed onto the WebCam-Stream at www.journal03.staedelschule-onlinegroup.org/
Recorded WebCam sequences can be retrieved from www.journal03.staedelschule-onlinegroup.org
Further information and images about the installation can be found below at
www.portikus.de/ArchivA0150.html
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