Waking the City Statues

The main objective of The Winter Lights Festival was to illuminate the dramatic darkness of winter with a collection of sparkling events, which both celebrate and emphasize the beauty of Reykjavík City. The festival was opened officially by the Mayor of Reykjavík, Jón Gnarr, at the Einar Jónsson Museum on Thursday 6th February featuring our light-art installation Waking the Statues which transformed the statues in the Sculpture Garden to come to life using projection mapping technology and synchronized lights taking guests to a mystical place by the help of lights, video and tone. The project was sponsored by the Scandinavian art and culture fund Kultur Kontakt Nord. The installation is scheduled to be exhibited in both Torshavn and Manchester later in the year.

Our Approach

The surreal, dark but beautiful museum garden was a perfect location for our dark and mysterious-themed light art. The concept was to give the statues life by emphasizing things that indicate life like their eyes blinking and their hearts pounding and bloodstream flowing. We also played with the outer dimensions of the statues and changed their appearances drastically with images and effects to create new things out of them. We syncronized the animated effects with DMX light controllers and ambient sounds to heighten the overall experience.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Projection Mapping

The trickiest part of this project was the fact that we had to do all mask creation on site. These statues only exist in the outdoor garden. All of our preparation was done in February, which is usually the most harsh and cold month of the year in Iceland. Once we set up the projectors we created a mask to fill the statue exactly without any spilling. Once we had the masks however we could work on compositing visual material in our heated homes.

LED Lighting

All lights in the garden had to be turned off since they interfered with the LED light installment. The default lights had a sunlight detector which we tricked by gaffer taping a small handheld LED light to the detector making the garden thing it was experiencing constant daylight. LED lights gave the overall visual style of the garden and we made sure to use the same color palettes for the DMX controller as for all digital material.

Visual Effects

Visual Effects work was done using Adobe After Effects. After we had created a mask of the statues we created various clips and visual loops to combine together on site for the final video material. It was certainly cold to do this finalization in the garden itself, but it is a known fact in the VJ (Video Jockey) world that doing the final visualization where everything will come together will have the best outcome.

Ambient Music

Sound installation for the light art was provided by the Icelandic Music Composer Hafdis Bjarnadottir. She used ambient sounds to from the actual surroundings to bend time and space. Many guests who lived nearby the museum would get confused about the church clock sounds because they didn’t match the usual timings of the Hallgrimskirkja tower. We also had specific sound effects coming from each statue like heartbeats.

4
Team Members
30
Days to make
8
Exhibition Days
6000
Guests