urban art

casa magica paint the town red, blue, green, etc.

For the past few years the Austrian capital of Vienna has provided its residents with an open ice-rink in front of the impressive facade of the City Hall, drawing crowds both day and night over a six week period in February and March. Previously the rink had been illuminated with spot and moving lights, however, for the year 2000 Casa Magica were invited by the city authorities to give the area a whole new atmosphere by means of architectural projection over the huge facade of the building.

The building is neogothic in style, its outer walls adorned with perforated ornamentations, columns and capitals, parapets, tracery windows, and ornate doorways. In order to complement the architectural complexity, Casa Magica's designers opted to imitate the often colourful and highly decorative style of neogothic interiors.

Casa Magica realised the project with four PANI BP 6 Gold II projectors positioned in two 8 m high towers which also housed the downlighting for the ice-rink itself.

The city of Reutlingen in southern Germany decided to welcome the new millenium with an event held in the central marketplace in the historic heart of the city. Casa Magica was invited and proposed to create a ³slow-motionã-show. This definition made associations in several directions: In the very sense of the word it was conceived as a series of panoramas extending over two sides of the marketplace (in total seven buildings), each to be shown for about two minutes and accompanied by a specially devised soundtrack. Slowing down the speed of the show in such a manner gave to the visitors the opportunity to amble around and view the various facades without the fear of missing parts of the show

The show of eight panoramas, which took about 16 minutes, was constantly repeated from 9 p.m. 'til midnight. Exactly at midnight the last round switched over to a ninth, final panorama which had not been shown in the previous versions and was timed to coincide with the peel of the surrounding church bells. Midnight was also the cue for a spontaneous pyrotechnic display which subsequently choked the marketplace with dense smoke and enhanced the colourful light beams emanating from the projectors. When things calmed down, the show, which was temporarily frozen on the final panorama during this period, was restarted and repeated until 2 a.m.

The idea behind the event was to express a cool and composed attitude towards the flow of time and encourage a philosophical approach of both history and the future. Regarding history, the eight panoramas focussed on important periods and aspects of the city; its proud times as a free city of the Holy Roman Empire; its successful industrial development in the 19th century; its inglorious period of national socialism; its vivid cultural and economic life after the Second World War up to present times.

The aesthetic transformation of these scenes is based on historical visual materials, taking into consideration the architectural facets of the buildings. As the two artists did not feel like giving any concrete predictions of what will happen in the new millenium they decided to keep their last, the post-midnight panorama, totally abstract in order to create a festive metamorphosis of the buildings themselves.

The production of the show, including the sound sample, was programmed and controlled using a Dataton Trax console. Six PANI 2,5-projectors with automatic slide changers were installed in two strategic positions to provide the visuals.

"urban art" in mondoarc, supplement 2/2000, S. 18ff