In June 2022, I did an intensive program for three weeks in Lacoste, France working with fourteen other SCAD students from around the world to create a projection exhibition inspired by the idyllic medieval village. We spent our days collecting visual and audio assets to build our animations and immersing ourselves in the environment, and we spent the nights testing out our designs on different buildings and experimenting with how our projections interact with the various surfaces.

This project didn't follow the tradition pipeline of narrative driven work containing storyboards or style frames for the initial phases, but rather just allowed for lots of experimentation.

Les Nocturnes

projection art

About the Audio!

To create the projection show as immersive as possible, speakers were installed surrounding the environments, and I used this opportunity to produce music that matched the visuals. I used a Zoom recorder to capture the sounds of Lacoste and a device called a MIDI Sprout that could convert a plant's biodata into MIDI, which I then used to create synth music. This collaboration with the cherry trees, grape vines, lavender, and other local plants made such unique sounds that I was able to compose together into the music you will soon hear with the following projections.

apologies for the dirty computer screen... :(

Location #1: The Arch

Due to its irregular shape, the arch proved to be the most challenging location and required many late nights of trial and error, trial and error, then finally trial and success :) The texture of this location was also really unique in the fact that we were projecting on top of stonework as well as the arch's jasmine and other surrounding foliage. This piece incorporates pieces of home represented by origami that interact with scans of local plants and imagery of Lacoste's beautiful nature.

Location #2: La Boulangerie

The library on SCAD Lacoste's campus is an old bakery that SCAD repurposed, which is the next surface we projected onto. This piece played with silhouettes and incorporating different textures that I gathered around the town. I used After Effects to recolor the assets to make it more engaging and suitable for a projected piece.

Location #3: The Lower Dorms

The lower dorms was our largest canvas yet, using three projectors to project onto the walls and trees surrounding a courtyard. This piece was difficult to document, as it was the most immersive of all the locations, but I had a lot of fun playing with how each intersection of the three walls would interact. This piece also used a lot of textures and drew on themes of the insect wildlife, the main one of which is bees due to the huge lavender fields in bloom nearby.