Media Installations | Projection Mapping | Gods by the Russian Apartments
610 views · Published 24 January 2013 · 6:11 · Indexed 10 October 2026
Channel: Matthew Ragan · 2013 · Education
Music by the very talented Russian Apartments The Russian Apartments on BandCamp: http://russianapartments.bandcamp.com/ The Russian Apartments on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/RussianApartments/ This week in the Media Installations course each person was charged with mapping some environment or object with video. While the wikipedia entry on the subject is woefully lacking, the concept is becoming increasingly mainstream. The idea is to use a projector and to paint surfaces with light in a very precise way. In the case of this course, the challenge was to cover several objects with simultaneous video. I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to map, and what I wanted to project, and was especially interested in using a zoetrope kind of effect in the process. I kept thinking back to late nights playing with Yooouuutuuube, and I wanted to create something that was loosely based on the kind of idea. To get started I found a video that I thought might be especially visually interesting for this process. My friend and colleague Mike Caulfield has a tremendously inspiring band called The Russian Apartments. The music he writes is both haunting and inspiring, an electronica ballad and call to action. It's beautiful, and whenever I listen to a track it stays with me throughout the day. Their videos are equally interesting, and Gods, a video from 2011, kept coming back to me. To start I took the video and created a composition in AfterEffects with 16 versions of the video playing simultaneously. I then offset each video by 10 frames from the previous. The Effect is a kind of video lag that elongates time for the observer, creating strange transitions in both space and color. I then took this source video and mapped it to individual surfaces, creating a mapped set of objects all playing the same video with the delay.
