Series Editor
Sylvie Leleu-Merviel
Edited by
Daniel Schmitt
Marine Thébault
Ludovic Burczykowski
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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Cover image: Copyright of Cité des Électriciens, Bruay-La-Buissière (France) © Rencontres Audiovisuelles – Video Mapping Festival 2018.
© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Daniel Schmitt, Marine Thébault and Ludovic Burczykowski to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952956
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-504-6
It is a well-worn idea that this century is one of an abundance of images. It is another to say that we live in an era of screens: for a long time, we had two in our lives – cinema and television. We then went from three, with the computer screen that opens up access to the immense resources of the Web and the Internet, to four with mobile tools – smartphones. Some are pursuing inflation by adding five (the intermediate terminal that is the tablet), six (the games console) and seven (the immersive helmet). Little by little, screens are saturating all the dimensions of our private but also public spaces, as we can see with the recent replacement of traditional advertising billboards by screens in our developed cities – this, moreover, without any consideration for the ecological impact that this mutation implies. The screen is everywhere.
This book opens a much less widespread space: the space of the image beyond the screen. From monumental projections on façades to more intimate projections on sets or objects. Is it worth stopping by? Isn’t this just a simple change of media? An additional avatar in the diversification of screens?
Juxtaposing chapters by researchers and testimonies by artists and practitioners experienced in this new form of projection, the texts gathered in this first book on projection mapping show in various ways that, on the contrary, a completely new form of expression, or even an art, is being exhibited.
On the one hand, several chapters remind us of this: Leon Battista Alberti, in De Pictura in 1435, presents the painting as an “open window”. Inside the frame, the “white canvas” is an immaculate void replaced by an external scene, similar to the opening of a window that allows the inhabitant to see the outside of his residence while remaining inside. The screen takes up this characteristic of painting: in a similar way, it is a window open onto a landscape and/or a scene to be inserted, totally independent from the place where it is located. The situation is quite different with projection mapping, which brings out the image on the set, and where the specific geometry of the projection medium reappears: it is essentially a question of “dealing with” it, and not of going through it to replace it with something else that has no connection and that ignores it.
On the other hand, the screen is also defined by immobility. It cuts a window of escape into the space and time of reality. In cinema or video, the reported scene that fits into the window is dynamic and has movement, but the window itself is motionless. Moreover, the inscription of the reported image takes no account of the environment, as shown by Rem Koolhaas’ caricatural aphorism about the context, which Ludovic Burczykowski recalls in Chapter 1. On the contrary, projection mapping develops a new mediation mechanism, that is “an action involving a transformation of the situation or the communicational mechanism, and not a simple interaction between elements already constituted, and even less a circulation from one element from one pole to another” (Davallon 2004, p. 43), as Alexandra Georgescu Paquin states in Chapter 11.
Thus, projection mapping is an emergence in the sense of Morin (Morin 1977; Juignet 2015): neither the medium, nor the projection, but an in-between. Or rather a third-party composition that could not survive without the medium or projection. A type of link, of junction from which the unexpected springs forth. This is what Martina Stella refers to as a subject-matter in Chapter 3. In this form of “narrative composition”, the reciprocal action of one on top of the other creates movement on a monumental medium. This is particularly the case in these ever-impressive sequences where the building explodes or collapses, or when a window appears that opens into a well-known facade that is known to be blind. In another style, this is also the case when the image animates a white marble statue, making it cry or laugh, changing its expression at will, following the viewer’s gaze or winking at him. And we start dreaming of marble statues that might start dancing!
Last but not least, the way in which monumental projection mapping is broadcast brings back to life a practice that is in retreat, that of strolling and street performance. During the second projection mapping festival in Lille in March 2019, more than 100,000 people walked for an entire evening between the spots spread throughout the city1. And it is no coincidence that this form of projection is so successful in this region of Hauts-de-France, which has always loved the big popular parades and street carnivals. The device imposes the social sharing of a collective viewing in the public space, far from the intimate, internalized and silent contemplation specific to cinema, or the superficial and distracted viewing that can be practiced alone or in groups in front of television or on mobile devices.
Finally, projection mapping embodies in a new way the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk dear to Richard Wagner. Indeed, sound is part of the projection mapping work, just like the image. It is therefore a form that links the object and/or the architectural environment with the audio-visual media. But experiments have already given way to gesture in the construction, such as this work which translates into images the gestures of the conductor conducting the musical work performed live. Taste and touch may follow in the dynamics of innovation.
In the end, we can only agree with Antoine Manier when he states that projection mapping works are in their infancy and will be structured. A grammar of projection mapping will be gradually developed. To master it, it will be essential to simultaneously understand how projection mapping makes sense, and what the viewer develops from the perceptual requests addressed to him (Leleu-Merviel 2018). Gradually, we will be able to move towards modelling in support of the design of works, as we were able to do some 20 years ago for hypertexts and hypermedia (Durand et al. 1997). Other techniques will emerge, such as photogrammetry (Chapter 8), while other algorithms will refine the correspondence calculations between the 3D surface and the mapped image, and other fields of implementation will be strengthened, such as the factory of the future (Chapter 10). Other concepts will structure the reflection about the image beyond the screen, such as mediatecture2 (Chapter 11). Undoubtedly, this book is only a foundation which many others will come to complete before we have covered the subject.
Sylvie LELEU-MERVIEL
Director of the DeVisu laboratory
Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France
Valenciennes
Alberti, L.B. (1435). De Pictura. Macula, Paris.
Davallon, J. (2004). La médiation: la communication en procès? MEI, 19, 37–59.
Durand, A., Huart, J., Leleu-Merviel, S. (1997). Vers un modèle de programme pour la conception de documents. Hypertextes et Hypermédias, 1(1), 79–101.
Juignet, P. (2015). Edgar Morin et la complexité. Philosophie, science et société [Online]. Available at: https://philosciences.com/philosophie-generale/complexite-systeme-organisation-emergence/17-edgar-morin-complexite.
Kronhagel, C. (2010). Mediatecture: the Design of Medially Augmented Spaces. Springer, Vienna.
Leleu-Merviel, S. (2018). Information Tracking. ISTE Ltd, London, and Wiley, New York.
Morin, E. (1977). La méthode 1. La nature de la nature. Le Seuil, Paris.
It is generally agreed that projection mapping consists of applying light whose geometry corresponds to a more or less complex surface made of heterogeneous materials on which it is projected. Is it really that simple? The practice of projection mapping has developed since the 1990s, particularly in the artistic field, by supporting the dynamics of digital technologies. This practice has now become almost commonplace, while paradoxically, research in the social sciences and humanities pays little attention to it. Certainly, projection mapping could be understood as a simple hybridization of cinema, animation and scenography, but that would miss the essential questions that this practice stimulates.
First of all, the very concept of projection mapping needs to be clearly defined: is it a tool, a device, a technique, a medium, a discipline, a practice, a trend or a movement? Can an image do without a connection to any surface? Projection mapping is synonymous with spatial augmented reality, video mapping and spatial correspondence. While the words video, projection, reality, augmented, spatial and correspondence have found their French equivalents, the word mapping presents itself as an obstacle to translation. Few say that they do “video cartography” or “projected cartography”. The term “mapping” refers to dressing, coating, texturing, covering, transposing and tuning. A rigorous translation of projection mapping as a medium in our context could then be “projection of correspondences” or “video-projected correspondences”.
In this book, many people use the expression projection mapping as we have retained it. Creators, broadcasters, sponsors, service providers, producers, audiences, enthusiasts, technophiles, critics from various disciplinary backgrounds define it and recognize themselves in its lexical field.
The Video Mapping European Center project, supported by Rencontres Audiovisuelles and the DeVisu laboratory of the Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France, offers and organizes training courses, artist retreats, screenings, a festival and a conference dedicated to projection mapping: Image Beyond the Screen International Conference (IBSIC). This project has informed this book, which aims to identify the different conceptions and practices of projection mapping in order to give it a status, identity, issues and perspectives. For us, it is a question of setting a milestone in favor of its theoretical existence as a medium and discipline in order to stimulate reflection, propose a new perspective on the scriptures, and enrich future practices. The research and points of view proposed in this book contribute to the construction of a shared theoretical object that was previously lacking. It is divided into three parts:
As far back as we can go in the history of light projection devices in space, it remains difficult to define precisely the genesis of projection mapping (Burczykowski). A practice that remains close to cinema and animation, but which is not totally in line with it. The screen, fixed, mobile, inert, living, pre-existing to the project or created specifically, is at the heart of the matter (Alvarez; Tardy). Video mapping is available in XXL format as well as in miniature, transportable and intimate format, perhaps promoting interactivity (George-Molland). It is far from being systematically narrative and offers transmedia and sustainable opportunities (Grisval). It often has audio to develop the contours of the world that the work seeks to create (Oury). The invention and subsequent democratization of the video projector and digital tools have paved the way for new forms of expression (Moulon). Artists have sometimes made the city their studio, their relationship to the workplace being essential in the creative process, which is far from being a long quiet river (Thébault and Schmitt). Other technological opportunities such as the automation of the geometric calibration of projected images (Kourkoulakou) and photogrammetry (Lissarrague) allow time saving during content creation by way of an accelerated evolution of methods and uses. A society can be defined through the evolution of its appliances and devices, but above all the appliances build the sensitive potential of a society (Stella).
Projection mapping is being developed in multiple ways. It serves the industry of the future by guiding complex and delicate assemblies of machined parts (Level). Based on a low-intrusive creative action, it transforms a heritage or updates a memory trace (Georgescu Paquin); it highlights content that enhances the medium (George-Molland). In architecture, projection mapping is becoming a learning device that promotes reflexivity and memorization (Boulekbache and Chibane). It offers game experiences (Alvarez) and although projection mapping writing is in its infancy, it will probably structure and develop (Manier). Experiments, whether aesthetic, technical or mediation, will be expanded. This audio-visual form is born with the evolution of needs, disrupting and broadening our perceptions (Labadz).
Image technologies influence the way we represent ourselves. They extend our body and allow us to visualize it (Paul). Projection mapping also offers a special experience; it is a source of amazement and wonder (Leroy). Most often, the illusion created by the projection does not require any equipment on board the spectators. The festival is now one of its main forms of expression, particularly in South America (Oury). For as much as and beyond the major events, electronic, technological and digital art is now spreading to institutions and galleries (Moulon). This is not without influence on their presentations and documentation of the collections and their conservation (Moulon; Paul).
We hope that these points of view will contribute to giving projection mapping a theoretical consistency, and thus accompanying and enriching the future of what could well become a new art, a new discipline, and a new field of research.
Introduction written by Daniel SCHMITT, Marine THÉBAULT and Ludovic BURCZYKOWSKI.