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Saw a guy in Portland projecting art onto a brick wall with a $40 projector and a laptop
I was walking through the Alberta Arts District in Portland two weeks ago and a crowd of maybe 15 people was standing around this brick wall. A guy had a cheap $40 mini projector zip tied to a milk crate and he was making these glitchy looping animations that shifted with the shadows of people walking by. It was honestly better than half the stuff I see in gallery shows with $3,000 setups. He told me he renders everything at 480p on purpose because the blur looks better on brick. Has anyone else messed with low res projection as a style choice, or am I overthinking this?
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ray6134d ago
There's actually a whole thing about this that I read about a while back, some artists call it "dirty projection" or lo-fi projection on purpose. The idea is that when you go super high res on a rough surface, the texture fights the image and it looks cheap, but when you lean into the low res, the blur becomes part of the piece. I remember reading that some folks in the 2000s started doing this with old VGA projectors at 640x480 because the scan lines and soft edges made the visuals feel more like paint on the wall. The guy you saw was basically doing it at 480p which is even lower, so the bounce and glow off the brick would look way softer and more organic. Anyone with a $3k setup would probably just get a crisp image that looks like a screen, not art. That thing about shadows changing the animation as people walk by is smart too, makes the crowd part of the show.
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