"Twirl"

Another project I did with Stephan Huber and Daniel Fusban. This time the challenge had been at a different level.

Stephan Huber invited the american artist Barbara Bloom to install one of her video artworks at Petuel Park Cafe in Munich. The installation was about having 8 VCRs supplying 19 TFTs distributed over three floors.
This sounds easy - I thought the same.
But it turned out to be much more complicated.
So why? There was the available space to install the hardware, there was the requirement to have the most simple handling of this setup for the people in the cafe - and there were those TFTs Barbara prefered to have. I learned a lot about TFTs during this project. They (at least those I finally got) have different viewing limits from top and bottom. So on some screens the video looked inverted they also tended to display reds and magentas very intensively so the complete video had to be color corrected especially for those monitors.

A part of the installation



Below some pictures from the original NTSC source and the converted and corrected PAL. With the given TFTs the original showed as more or less completely red. Also the original was too dark and the white background wasn't the same white for each clip. The problem was that I didn't had access to the original clips and all transitions were quite difficult to handle during CC.




A view of the back of the disk recorders. The given space is 19 cm depth, 23/25 cm width and 120 cm height. The top 20 centimeters were "eaten" by cables, the bottom 20 centimeters also were needed for cables power supply and control unit. An nNovia A2D unit with adapter cable already exceeded the given dimension either in depth or width.
So I had to bend the adapter smoothly. There was the need to have access both to the back of the VCRs and the front panel. It took some time to figure out the correct pivot point, but finally everything (VCRs, video distributors, fans and cables) fitted smoothly into the housing.
Additionally we build (with perfect support from nNovia) a control unit, which controls all A2Ds, so in the morning the A2Ds are powered up and a "Play" command is sent to all of them, after that is done the TFTs are switch on automacially. In the night first the TFTs are switched off, then the VCRs are stopped and the power for the whole system is turned off.

"Katastrophen und Rettung" ("Disaster and Rescue")

One of the most complicated projects I did with Stephan Huber and Daniel Fusban had been the "Katastrophen und Rettung" text neon spiral.
We started with a rough scribble and some handwritten text. The first step was to bring this scribble of Stephan Huber into an "optimized" 3D space, to have a better understanding how it would look in the actual building. "Optimized" 3D means that there had to be only a few circle elements with same diameters, but the final spiral still should look very random.
After that had been done and a basic spiral had been constructed, all the handwriting text was digitized by hand to get it as bezier lines - this way we were able to test which diameter the neon tubes should have later on. Then I measured the real legth of text and compared that to the actual length of the two spirals we got - unfortunately that didn't fit and we had to change both the text and the spiral again. But that was also only another beginning.
Now I measured the real length of the neon tubes, this way we could get a weight of the construction itself, which should hang in the air. This weight and a 3D file were given to an egineering team to calculate the static of the construction. The basic plan was to use two times 8 wires which were fixed in the first and upmost floor. It took them some days to let their simulation program find the best alternative how to span those wires, unfortunately that didn't fit at all with the spiral itself - means that the wires suddenly were intersecting the spiral and those mounting units connecting the tubes to the wires didn't fit any more.
I had to reconstruct all the spiral again to make it fit somehow into the optimal static construction and the engineers (finally their computers) had to calculate the static again and I had to … and they had to … - this was quite a lengthy process.
Finally we got a final spiral with optimized statics.
Now the next step; since the spiral (or text base line) was constructed out of quarter circles, the angle of each quarter circle was different, because there was the need that this parts always covered the same distance in the Y axes. I had to figure out the 3D position of every letter in space and which "quarter circle" it belongs to. This was also quite a tough job since I needed to distribute words and letters to certain circle parts without destroying the visual appearance of the original handwriting. After I got that, I had to calculate the angle of each text part to slant it and to bring it to an angle the neon manufacturer could use - the 3D text always had to be vertical and the slant of the handwriting must be same (visually) through all the spiral.
After that I was able to create the files to do the plots for the neon bending and the construction plans for the quarter cylinders, so the neon guys could start.

This was just a really rough and short description of the project. But the result looks impressive.

"Im Fluss" ("In the Flow" - hard to translate, it's both the "flow" and the "river")

This project I did with Stephan Huber and Daniel had been a real huge neon installation at the Allianz main office at Frankfurt. As always we started with some scribble and I did an optimizing for those scribbles to make it work in reality. In this case I did build the complete building as a rough 3D model and put in the complete artwork to visualize how it could look like, I did an 5 minute walk through the building (which I'm unfortunately not allowed to show here).
One of the challenges had been to create the real world construction out of the visualiation.

"Zwei Pferde für Münster" ("Two Horses for Münster")

One of the first projects I did with Stephan Huber and Daniel Fusban. We had an 3d scan of two small horses. I had to figure out how they would look like in "neon slices".
I build several variations of the neon horses and put the modells into a virtual city plan. After that I made several virtual "fly by" to test how tube diameter and distance relates to the Moiree when being a pedastrian or a car driver. Additionally the position of the horses was optimized by this simulations.