"Murmurations" by Shared Space and Light

I love art installations that feature projection mapping and English video art collective Shared Space and Light creates some gorgeous pieces. I was especially struck by their presentation Murmurations, a projection of starlings flying along the coast off Brighton using the windows of a converted church.

Their site explains:
Living in Brighton near the sea it's impossible to be unaware of the daily ebb and flow of starlings along the coast. They've roosted in numerous sites along the seafront and we've filmed their murmurations about 50 times over the years, often in slow motion to capture the full majesty.

So what a pleasure to be able to draw on this resource to make an installation for the art gallery Fabrica here in Brighton - we tested rear projecting onto the 3 tall windows of the converted church that face onto the street.

Content-wise there were several challenges - how to add graphic layers to the flight of the starlings to emphasise their collective motion and flight paths; getting the flocks of starlings to look like they were flying inside the church, and finally the content also needed to respond to the dense gridding of the windows.

Master musician Owen Crouch made a soundtrack that echoes the gently shifting parallax and layering.

The installation ran nightly from outside Fabrica Gallery in Brighton from November 2020 to January 2021, then was adapted for the beautiful Kirkstall Abbey at the Leeds Light Night Festival, and again at Fabrica over Christmas/New Year 2021/22.

https://www.sharedspaceandlight.com/

AURA at the Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

Earlier this year, multimedia stuido Moment Factory unveiled their newest creation using mind-boggling projection mapping to highlight the interior Gothic architecture and art of the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal. Trees full of lush green or ripe with orange autumn leaves seem to loom over the arches of the soaring basilica, snow and lightning swirl above, and scintillating specks and lines of light limn columns, statues, and figures in paintings. This 45 minute show called AURA took a year to plan and create, another 90 days to install, and utilizes 21 projectors, 140 lights, and 20 mirrors. The accompanying original soundtrack composed by Marc Bell and Gabriel Thibaudeau required 30 musicians, 20 chorists and the basilica’s organ.

The Moment Factory website's official page states the mission:

"The Fabrique de la paroisse Notre-Dame de Montréal asked Moment Factory to create a permanent experience with sound, light and video that would invite visitors to discover the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal in a whole new way.

Our challenge was to create a show that is universal, that captivates, touches, and inspires visitors from any background. Moreover, a show that highlights the Baslica’s many artworks and architecture, all while respecting the religious heritage and activity of the church. The canvas was also a challenge from a technical point of view, being the first example of such complex colour, texture, and scale, resulting in a video-mapping process done pixel by pixel.

AURA begins as a self-led tour to explore the basilica, discovering multimedia installations that showcase various of the basilica’s cherished artworks. This first part of the experience encourages visitors to explore the basilica’s details at their own pace and to become enveloped in
its universe.

Then light, original orchestral scores, and grandiose architecture unite to create a multimedia show whose captivating energy takes visitors from floor to ceiling,
and beyond."

This is for ma chère amie Odette who saw such psychedelic light shows in her own tiny chapel while growing up in France as an imaginative little girl in tune with mystical forces.

http://aurabasiliquemontreal.com/
https://momentfactory.com/work/all/all/aura

Ruins In Snow

BEAUTY: Installation--Miguel Chevalier at Nuit Blanche 2016

For this year's Nuit Blanche celebration in Paris on October 1st, 2016, artist Miguel Chevalier created a stunning projection installation in the Saint-Eustache Church.

His website artist statement says:
"For many years, the Saint Eustache Church has shared in such great moments of the artistic life of the city of Paris as Nuit Blanche (All-Nighter), an occasion to offer some 10,000 night visitors the opportunity to discover the city’s historical heritage.
For Nuit Blanche 2016, Father George Nicholson, Priest of Saint-Eustache and Françoise Paviot, curator in charge of contemporary art at the Saint Eustache Church, are proposing Miguel Chevalier’s virtual-reality installation 'Voûtes Célestes.' This new is accompanied by musical improvisations played by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard, titular organist for Saint Eustache Church’s great organ and repertoires performed by Les Chanteurs de Saint-Eustache.

'Voûtes Célestes' is a generative and interactive virtual-reality artwork projected onto the Saint Eustache Church’s chancel vaults, its central nave, its transept crossing, and its two transepts. Surprising imaginary sky charts are created in real time. The visitor discovers a variety of colored networks of light that spread out in the form of sinuous webs. These large meshes take form and then lose their shape, changing following the movements of visitors in the central nave, creating ever renewed, diversified universes.
'Voûtes Célestes' highlights the site’s architecture, the volumes of the columns and ribbed vaults come to life before our eyes. Their colorful gridworks create surprising trompe l’oeil effects. These suspended universes accentuate one’s impression of the monument’s loftiness and lightness.
Visitors are invited to stroll around, to sit in the pews, and to lift up their eyes toward the heavens. These digital constellations of pixels immerse visitors in an atmosphere bathed in light while opening unto infinity. The installation releases radiant energy into this space of plenitude. Amplified by Saint Eustache’s organ music, the installation induces a spiritual and contemplative feeling of elevation. Light, color and movement create a poetics of matter and elaborate a new aesthetics of virtuality."

Nuit Blanche is a marvelous arts festival which takes place in Paris on the first Saturday of October. Started in 2002, the free, all-night event combines visual arts of all kinds with music, perfromance, and dance at venues spanning the city. Naturally, artists take advantage of the darkness of night and many works and installations are light-based. Chevalier's "Voûtes Célestes" was presented from 8:30PM to 6AM. The principal organist at Saint-Eustache, Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard, played improvised music while watching the kaleidoscopic, psychedelic patterns morphing overhead.

http://www.miguel-chevalier.com/en/voutes-celestes
www.saint-eustache.org

BEAUTY: Installation--Claire Morgan

Claire Morgan (previously here) has created another lovely piece using torn, multicolored polythene fragments. Called Act of God, this luminous sphere was shown at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln in Cologne, Germany. Is it descending into the space, trailing a comet tail--or was the sphere present and it is disassembling and ascending upward?

http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/

Images by Christopher Clem Franken
http://www.ccfranken.de/

BEAUTY: Design--Mathieu Lehanneur

Designer Mathieu Lehanneur's imagination and vision are amazing. He has created objects, furniture, installations, products, stores, but it was this light that first caught my attention. Entitled "Les Cordes," the idea of a chandelier or ceiling light is stripped down into something entirely minimalistic, functional, futuristic, but breathtakingly lovely. The organic-looking cords of LED lights seem to drip from and return to the ceiling plane on their own. And I just love the contrast between this spartan, futuristic sensibility and the Beaux-Arts style of the building, Château Borely, in Marseille. Stunning work.

For Milan Design Week 2013, Lehanneur, in collaboration with Turkish Stones, created a piece called "Liquid Marble," a small shed of a space made of marble with an interior churning "pool" also made from marble. Of the disorienting piece, Lehanneur says, "I hope that, when entering this room, the visitor will experience something that comes closes to what happened to the many characters who opened a magic portal to a forbidden place in so many fairytales. Everything is liquid in this space, evanescent, and yet it is executed in a material that is the most solid imaginable."

And perhaps the most spectacular piece in Lehanneur's portfoilio is the Choir at the Romanesque St. Hilaire Church in Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France. He layered slices of white marble to resemble isobars, put the baptistry in one of the depressions, and used natural onyx for the altar and ambo. Again, the contrast of the ancient architecture with this sleek, modern addition brings a beautiful tension and makes the space vital and current.

http://www.mathieulehanneur.fr/

Jean Cocteau in Villefranche-sur-Mer

I am a huge fan of the work of Jean Cocteau and I was thrilled to be able to visit his exquisite Chapelle Saint-Pierre in the lovely village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, a vertical village located on the French Riviera.

Cocteau first came to Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1925 and spent a prolonged visit at the Hotel Welcome in order to kick his opium addiction. Across the street from the Welcome was a tiny little chapel, right on the bay, dating from the late 1500s. By the time Cocteau encountered it, it was a storage room for fishermen's nets because of its convenient location right next to the boats. He fell in love with Villefranche and lobbied the local government for permission to transform the chapel-cum-storage room back into a chapel. He gained permission in 1957 and set about painting the façade of the building and creating magical murals on the inside.

Since photography inside the chapel is forbidden, here are a few scans of some of the post cards on sale inside. The breathtaking murals which cover every surface inside the chapel depict scenes from the life of St. Peter (Pierre), patron saint of fishermen.

To the left of the chapel (if you are standing facing it) is a plinth with a bust of Cocteau sculpted by Cyril de La Patellière, and a plaque with Cocteau's words, "Quand je regarde Villefranche, je voir ma jeunesse, fassent les hommes qu’elle ne change jamais" ("When I see Villefranche, I see my youth. May men make sure it never changes.")

And up the stairs from the docks toward the old village is rue Obscure, or "the hidden road" which is a Medieval passage once part of the original rampart of the walls that protected Villefranche. It was an open parapet until it was enclosed and built over by buildings during the next hundred years or so. It served as a mysterious location for scenes in Cocteau's last film, "The Testament of Orpheus." As part of an Artist's Walk, there is a ground plaque of a piece of art by Cocteau showing the rue Obscure with the words from his memorial by the St. Pierre Chapelle.

Cocteau's influence is still felt in Villefranche: floating among the boats next to the St. Pierre Chapelle, I noticed a vessel named for one of Cocteau's greatest films, "Orphée," in Cocteau's handwriting!