Men at Parties
In the run-up to last Friday night’s Sound Noir party, I had some ideas as to how I wanted to use a couple projectors. The problem then was coming up with the projectors themselves.
Hoping to skirt the cost of shipping involved in buying projectors from eBay, I reached out to Benton-C Bainbridge who does some pretty serious video and VJ work. Once he’d figured out what I was looking for, he shot back a link to a craigslist post and said, “I can’t really compete on prices like this.” The link took me to two carousel projectors with a lot of amenities for $50. A ZipCar excursion — my first — to Jersey got me setup. Thanks much, Benton!
Unfortunately one of the projectors had trouble loading slides from its carousel, so I figured I’d just have a single slide loaded in it, and thought that perhaps I could replace it manually if I felt like it. I knew I wanted to project the slides I’d made from shots of Robert Longo’s Men in Cities. A couple years ago, I’d shot digital images of several pieces from the book, and inverted the black on white to white on black then burned them to slides.
The room already had a couple red light bulbs in it, and we were using red for the flyer, so I thought I’d stick with the theme and gelled the projection accordingly. This took some experimentation, but I just used sample gells I’d gotten from Set Shop. A small piece of gaffers tap later and it was set. The photo above doesn’t do it justice, but I put a lot of time into finding colors that complemented each other. The photo doesn’t show any of the detail from the image hitting the wall at a glancing blow, but it seems the composition was good enough that people took note. Ian Roberts had trouble figuring what exactly was going on — which projector was throwing which image — and Anna caught several people looking at, and discussing, the composition.
Very simple to setup but I feel it added a lot to the room.
Over the course of the night, I’d grow tired of individual figures projected, so I’d simply change them. I don’t know that people were particularly attentive to these changes, but the rotation was satisfying to me personally.
Just a note: There was a second room in the venue that was definitely quieter and offered a nice break from the main room where you could carry a conversation. In that room, I setup our friend Dan’s digital projector and threw a collection of Stan Brakhage’s films on the wall at a glancing angle. The video covered the majority of the wall and at an angle took the already abstract imagery and abstracted it further.
I’ve got a decent amount of time to figure out what to do with the next party. I’d actually like to get a couple more projectors, and will be looking for imagery to push through them. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m looking to start experimenting with video. I’ve started collecting loops, and Anna’s tipped me off to the fact that she’s buying me a Flip Camera for my birthday! There’s a lot more experimentation and fun to be had this next month or so.
