fifty foot benzo

Actually that title could be a bald-faced lie... I'm crap at estimating size or scale, so I have no idea whether the projection was 20 feet or 30 feet or 50 feet or 100 feet. All I do know is that the building is 25 storeys tall... so you do the math.

After the movie last night, Ma and I bypassed my place and came into the city to check out a Moving Image Project piece for the SALA Festival, "Projectorbitions" by Benzo, Store, Jules, Fredrock, Tarnz, Nish, Orgen, Stoops, Koven and the interestingly named Gary Seaman.

Essentially they paired up, set up a time lapse camera (it was either time lapse or else the film had been sped up dramatically, I'm not sure which) and went to work on a piece of street art. Then they've projected the five movies on a loop against the side of a building in Waymouth Street (on the right hand side as you drive down from King William Street, just before Topham Mall).

I'll admit, it wasn't the best thing to do when you have a crick in your neck... and I'm not sure if it was the projector or the original camera or the fact that there was ambient light around or what, but while the photo makes it look like the movie is in black and white, a couple of the other sequences had some slight colouration to them... so I'm not sure what was going on there.

It was amazing to watch though... because the film was moving so fast, you never saw the artists really, except as blurs, the occasional dark blob or a ghostly images moving rapidly through the frame, but the artwork just seemed to throw itself up on the wall, and then it would be static for a bit, then it might suddenly change radically.

Interestingly, I don't know that if we hadn't been standing around outside staring up at it if anybody would have noticed (or if the people who appeared out of the nearby buildings have been seeing it since it started last Friday and are now over it). In fact we attracted the attention of the security guard inside the building who came out to see what we were staring at... and then a taxi driver who'd come to pick somebody up stopped and was having a look.

We didn't stay for the whole five movie loop, although I don't think we were far from it... actually, I think we saw four and a bit... I will say though that given the concept of projecting the image onto a wall and having two different (at least) artists working in each movie, there was only really one of the ones that we saw that I think "worked". It was a piece by Store and somebody (sorry whoever you are) where Store did this gorgeous woman's face on the bottom half of the image and then the other artist took over and came up with this wonderful anthropomorphic Carmen Miranda hat. But when it was finished it was one complete piece. That's very much what all the other pieces lacked... they didn't really feel like a complete entity when they were finished.

And, wouldn't you know it, I didn't get a picture of that one (honestly, I couldn't be bothered unfurling my tripod again by that stage).

Of course, it's on tonight and tomorrow, I could always go back...

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