XL Gets Arty At The Guggenheim

XL Video was asked to build an LED monolith on the ground floor of New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum for a special set by electronic music pioneer Richie Hawtin as part of a fundraiser hosted by the Young Collectors Council.
The gig was Project Managed for XL Video by Paul 'Macca' McCauley from the UK office, who was asked to produce a video solution for the visual concept created by Ali Demirel & Hawtin.
The requirement for the LED tower was that it had no visible supporting structure and appeared right in the centre of the main performance area.
The tower superstructure was constructed first, then clad with XL’s Pixled F-11 LED product – 12 tiles high and four-wide on each face.
The tiles had to be modified so they would attach to the structure leaving a minimum of 20mm gaps around all edges of each tile.
A pre-build was completed at XL’s Atlanta facility by Macca and LED Tech Pieter Laleman.
At the Guggenheim, the LED tower structure was built the night before, and then the cables removed so the Museum could open to the public as as normal the next day.
All the show video content was generated in real-time by Hawtin's and his visual team's laptops running state of the art TouchDesigner software from Derivative Inc. The feeds were fed in through XL's Barco ImagePRO-II which enabled switching (if needed) between their main machine going in on DVI and their backup utilizing the HDMI input.
The control position was set up six metres back from the LED tower facing onto one of its corners.
Some additional lighting fixtures were installed to augment the picture, but the LED tower was the main light source.
Macca comments: "It was an exciting, ambitious and totally different project due to the innovative music and the unorthodox environment for this type of performance…which produced amazing results and great vibes."
www.xlvideo.com
(IT/MH)