We’ve seen our fair share of projection mapping projects over the past few years, but every once in a while, we’ll see one that tries to elevate the art form and take it into new aesthetic directions. Such is the case with Chiaroscuro, a gorgeous new wall installation by Brooklyn-based artist Sougwen Chung for the Mapping Festival in Geneva earlier this month.
Like most projection work we’ve seen, Chiaroscuro is an optical illusion inducing interplay between light and shadow, alternating between illuminating and masking forms to reveal various elements in the piece and lend a sense of dynamism and motion to stationary structures. In this work, Chung’s delicate and intricate line work is also accented by LED light coils embedded under paper appliques that give the wall mural a three dimensional quality and extend the visuals beyond the flat plane, a technique that melds perfectly with the optical effects of light projection.
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The piece also includes an ambient score by Praveen Sharma that controls the LEDs to lend a cohesion to the space. Chung writes in her artist statement that “If drawing is a metaphor for basic human expression, Chiaroscuro is an immersive installation that augments the drawn image in scale, sound, and scope by harnessing the imaginative potential of interdisciplinary processes and technologies.”
We caught up with Chung over email to find out more about her creative process and how she goes about making projection mapping feel new again.
The Creators Project: This is the second version of Chiaroscuro you’ve presented. How is it different from the first?
Sougwen Chung: The first Chiaroscuro was more of an étude; a study in working with the large-scale sculptural drawing form, light projections and sound. I took the experience of working with this initially in October, shown as part of Ghostly International’s “Art and Artifice” exhibition at The Art Directors Club, and progressed it further in terms of concept, scale, and scope for this exhibition at The Musee D’art Modern Contemporain de Geneve.
Your line work is beautiful. Is your background in drawing and painting? How did you first begin doing this type of multimedia work?
Thank you. I have a background in painting coupled with a formal education in interactive art and graphic design. I do consider drawing an elemental part of my process to date; there is something about the inherent honesty of the drawn line I find uniquely satisfying. I’m curious about how simple expressions like drawing can be augmented by technology. It is certainly an exciting time to seek inventive ways of intersecting traditional and digital processes and mediums. Mark-making in particular communicates “the human element” uniquely, which, when brought back into the digital realm creates room for a type of discovery that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Detail view of Chung’s abstract, monochromatic line-work and paper attachments that give a three dimensional quality to the mural.
How does the drawn projection mapping work? Can you explain that a bit more?
The forms in the room are captured through a spacial scanning function which is part of the software Mad Mapper by GarageCUBE and 1024 Architecture. The function essentially turns the perspective of the projector into a type of camera; registering the values from a camera and then translating that pixel data into the vantage point of the projector. The software in its current iteration isn’t meant to register intricate line-work, so for the areas in which the pixel data contains too many artifacts, I compensate with hi-res photography (which, for this installation, involved a lot of taking snapshots from ladders at 6AM and such.) After the final image is compiled, I re-draw the image using bezier curves and create masks out of the line-work.
To some extent, I’m bending the technology to my will by using a combination of techniques that work uniquely for this project. It is a highly bespoke installation.
How does the piece react to the audio score?
The LED lights, programmed by Adam Harvey respond to audio frequencies in the composition. At the moment the effect is quite subtle, but those subtle details can add finesse to the experience for the audience.
Projection mapping has become a bit over-saturated over the last year or two with a lot of terrible building projections. But your work shows that there is still much more to discover about the form. What are the qualities of projection mapping that you think are most underutilized by artists?
There is a lot of opportunity to consider creating unique structural forms, ranging from paper sculpture to 3D printing, and to experiment with materials and transparency. The type of surface one projects onto is only limited by the imagination. Allowing the material, environment, and form to inspire and inform the projection is essential in manifesting new visual expressions.
Perhaps there is value in abstracting how we think about projection mapping; projection mapping is, at its core, more than perpetuating a particular aesthetic. Rather, I see it as a way to experiment with light and scale on form and material. Thinking about projection by its essential components can be a useful way to begin to side-step existing conventions. After all, there is still so much to explore.
All images courtesy Sougwen Chung.
