Projection Marketting x Guerilla Marketting: Art or Advertising

Posted on by scamp123

Recently Melbourne was host to White Night, one of the biggest cultural events in Australia. It featured art exhibits and interactive projection mapping installations across town and drew hundreds of thousands to the city. But what surprised some spectators was how the company Audi, a major sponsor, had it’s own.

Watch the Audi Array installation here and decide for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhN_DnqiCPI

Of course this isn’t the first time projection mapping has been used in advertising, in fact it’s huge in guerrilla marketing. So why is this so different and why are people so offended by it’s inclusion? Companies like adidas, abc, Lexus and Nike have hugely popular campaigns that include projection mapping.


The Audi installation featured two brand new Audi TT’s as that main attraction in a “forrest of light columns”. It was labelled as a “must-see performance, a ballet of light and sound that echoes the visionary technology” of the brand new model. Just as intriguing as the argument as to whether or not it was blatant advertising or an art piece however, is the fact that it was included in itself.

It’s inclusion showed us how designers are constantly trying to keep up with new and exciting trends and stay within the interests of consumers. Just like these brands have to promote themselves in different ways, we are also forced to find new ways to accommodate our own lives to new technology and the issues they cause. Most of the time, it’s not us that is changing technology, it’s technology evolving that forces us to change the way we do things.

Thoughts: PressPausePlay

Posted on by scamp123

Technology has become such a key aspect of our everyday life and in our current world you only have to have access to the internet to break into an industry.

The documentary “PressPausePlay” and discusses the explosion of online sharing, and raises the question; will the social media revolution cause art to become mediocre?

The issue with the availability of digital media tools is that anybody can make art. And although most of the time this is awesome for us amateurs, I’d never thought of it on the other hand. What does it mean for the professionals and the true talents? Something that stood out to me quite a bit was that one of the interviewees, Andrew Keen, suggested that artist icons such as Martin Scorcese, Andy Warhol and Beethoven wouldn’t have made it in this day and age because they wouldn’t have been able to get noticed amongst the amount of competition they would have on the internet. Which  isn’t really that hard to argue with when you think about it. So what are the consequences of the digital media revolution? Is this really an issue or do the benefits of accessible and available technology far outweigh the disadvantages?

Press Pause Play is an intriguing documentary, showcasing opinions from different fields of digital media. It will get you thinking about the world we live in, probably in ways you wouldn’t have thought before.

D.I.Y

Posted on by scamp123

For anybody that wants to create, now is the perfect time. There are so many ways to do so many different things due to the fact that we are able to share ideas and communicate so easily with each other online.

For budding musicians, programs like Ableton and media services like SoundCloud have given them the platform they need to create their own stuff without the help of professional (and expensive) producers/studios. But for other forms of digital art like projection mapping, it’s a little more difficult.

High quality projectors can be expensive, and affordable programs can be hard to come by for amateurs. However the people behind HeavyM plan to change this.

Launching in early 2015 HeavyM is a free, downloadable tool that gives anybody with a laptop and a projector the chance to give projection mapping a shot. “Putting projection mapping in locations not normally possible” is it’s vision, and hopefully we’ll be able to see some examples of it very soon.

For most of us, if we’ve seen projection mapping anywhere it’s been at a festival or at a live music show.

Dillon Francis, Childish Gambino (seen above), Flying Lotus, Arcade Fire and Skrillex are among some of the most noted displays, and with technology we can now all try, it might be a matter of time until projection mapping makes its way onto the local club scene and into smaller shows and festivals.

Has it already? If you’ve seen any amateur displays emerging please share them with us!

Where It All Began

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It’s fair to say that projection mapping has made it’s mark in the digital art scene over the past few years. Look it up and you’ll find tonnes of examples of new displays from all around the world; independent artists, amateurs, musicians, musical festivals, advertisers, big brands at all. But where did it all start?

Put simply, projection mapping is the art of projecting onto a three dimensional surface, and it’s been around longer than you’d expect.

Although only recently exploding onto the scene, what we know to be the first example of projection mapping was seen at Disneyland California in 1969 at the beginning of the iconic Haunted Mansion ride. 16mm footage was projected onto the five sculptures known as the “Grim Grinning Ghosts”

SingingBusts

Following an immersive art installation in 1980, Disney patenting “Apparatus and method for projection upon a three-dimensional object and GE following suit in 1994, in 1998 projection began picking up steam. Once it was explored in academia, the term ‘Spatial Augmented Reality’ was born from UNC Chapel Hill academics, with a paper called the “Office of the Future”. Basically, this office foresaw a world where anything could be projected upon, and from the picture below they weren’t far off some of the things we see in every second sci-fi film.

Pretty cool.

sketch