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19th December 2024
A Feast for the Senses
By Julie Brown, Executive Director of imitating the dog
IBSIC – Image Beyond the Screen International Conference and Video Mapping Festival in Lilles
I’m just back from a whirlwind 3 days of meetings, talks, panel sessions, and watching new video mapping work in the pretty streets of Lille.
We were invited to the conference with a particular request to take part in the Talent Connection event which was half a day of back-to-back 15-minute meetings between artists and festivals, fuelled by coffee and croissants. I was firmly wearing my ‘Light Up Lancaster Festival’ hat for this session, but the conversations covered the work imitating the dog makes for other festivals and events, as well as what we programme in Lancaster. It was a brilliant (if fairly exhausting) morning, meeting people from France, Tunisia, Germany, Argentina, Spain, Hungary… all with work to show or projects to enthuse about. The range of work was staggering.
At the conference, a fascinating keynote speech was given by legendary projection artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who has been making projection work since the 1980s! Talking us through some of his projects, from the delightfully simple Scotia Tower project in 1981, to the extraordinary Tijuana Projection in 2001, he talked movingly about working with communities of people – particularly about the necessary investment in time, in gaining trust, of a sharp awareness that their misery is not a tool for our entertainment, and about the lack of a suitable descriptor for the people who have been the subject of his work – when ‘participants’ is woefully inadequate, he suggested that perhaps ‘collaborators’ or ‘partners’ might be better, although still not fully representative of the role they play.
It was refreshing to see this projection work, centred around people, around human emotions and connectivity. Later in the day, during a ‘Where is the Art?’ round-table discussion, this was more deeply explored, and a comment from Artichoke’s Helen Marriage struck home: reflecting on what’s at the heart of our video-mapping projects she warned against losing people from the art, asking ‘are we losing the love?’
On the second day of presentations, a real highlight was hearing from Gong Zhen, representing SKG+, a leading video mapping company in China. Making the connection between video mapping and cultural tourism, he spoke about the move in many cities and towns in China to install permanent projection facilities so that installations could be readily hosted. In a memorable moment, he showed a slide of images of extraordinary places to visit in China – the Great Wall, incredible waterfalls, systems of caves, and then how they could be ‘enhanced’ with video mapping. Dazzling images of other-wordly, and beautiful flora and fauna drifted across the screen. Remarkable and impressive, but I did momentarily wonder if we could be moving to a world where the actual flora and fauna were deemed passe and replaced with hyper-bright, enormous and loud moving images of flowers and trees growing up walls… It is undeniable, however, that the scale and ambition of this company’s work is so impressive – from mapping onto traditional Chinese structures to enormous shopping malls, and even in a series of underground caves. Talking about a light festival in China’s Chongqing city, he tells us that they were struggling to find a building suitable for hosting projections as part of their international mapping competition. The solution? Let’s build one!
An inspiring few days, finished off with 3 hours of projections across the city of Lille, with 20 new pieces presented on a wide range of historic buildings and monuments. It was interesting to see that a couple of the buildings hosted more than one short projection on a loop; the Palais des Beaux-Arts showed 7 works, each about 3 or 4 minutes long, back to back, to a huge crowd of happy visitors.
So, what were my take-aways from the trip? I’ll think about the connections made, and the ever-growing list of brilliant video mapping artists out there, and about programming short pieces of work which can loop on the same building, and to keep our minds open to the broader ambitions, including mapping on monuments and in unusual spaces, not just building facade, and remember to always, always, keep the love in the art.
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