The Empire of Miss Understanding

Clockwise from top left: Soans and Isis; Fernandez and Isis; Isis; Weber and Soans

An ensemble of local musical/lyrical talent, collaborating as "The Royal Court", joined cellist Isis M on her return to the Courtyard Playhouse today (and yesterday) for a unique performance entitled The Empire of Miss Understanding.

The show's pop-surreal theme graphic art -- also printed on the performers' clothes -- matched the abstract and metaphorical leanings of the lyrics and Maria Papadaki's video backdrop, in a setting that was subtly scenographed by Filipa Santos. After a couple of her solos, Isis was accompanied by Keigan Soans, Adam Weber, and Caroline Fernandez in several permutations, the latter adding vintage vocals and contemporary spoken word to her cello instrumental background, sometimes with a guitar layer.

The result was an intriguing spectacle of alt music and video art, unpretentious and often captivating. Vocals were good throughout, but in terms of lyrics, I especially liked the second half. The arrangement made excellent use of the range of the cello and the loop pedal, both as a solo instrument, and in combination with the other instruments and vocals.

Video Mapping with VJZARIA at Maraya Art Centre

Edgar Salmen, known to his Movida patrons as VJ Edmosh, presented about a dozen attendees with his extensive experience in video mapping in a demo workshop at Maraya Art Centre today. Edmosh, who founded and directs the VJZARIA group that specializes in this domain, has worked on a number of high-profile video mapping projects. This technology-heavy art form is great for clubs and EDM festivals, but has also made it to competitions and public art installations (including a scattered few in this region).

Remember this?

He started with a little history of video mapping, quickly moving on to a sequence of videos showcasing his work, including one at Sikka earlier this year. Far from being just an animated loop projected on an uneven target surface, video mapping requires careful environmental surveying, layout planning, surface mapping and computer graphics work, as Edmosh demonstrated with a sample project based on a picture of an antiquated building. He showed how the image is fitted to guidelines, divided into its component projection surfaces, and can have various effects and animations applied to it, all using specialized software and plug-ins.

Finally, he walked us through the mapping of a selection of random shapes stacked at the other end of the room. He showed us how to pick out and define shapes from a perspective, and play around with application of effects.

There were many, many audience questions - not surprising, given that this field is still growing in its range of tools and techniques. While we only covered static single-perspective video mapping (Maraya might be organizing a full hands-on workshop in future, for those interested), we also discussed some famous examples of multi-perspective and moving projection.

Kurt Hentschläger with Campus Art Dubai at Pavilion Downtown

Last Sunday, Campus Art Dubai brought renowned audiovisual artist Kurt Hentschläger to Pavilion Downtown, where he presented and discussed some of his projects. The presentation included not only his independent work, but also his Granular Synthesis collaboration series.

A lot of these were really impressive, especially given that Hentschläger has made something of a name for himself in creating large-scale, immersive works. As well as a select few others, he spoke about two of them - CORE and ZEE - at length, noting how the former projected a hellish impression of mis-coordination and intrusion, while the latter facilitated the self-perception of disembodiment and loss of visual bearings that was described by some as heaven-like (those in whom it did not induce epileptic seizures, that is).