Batwin + Robin continues its success in the corporate sector with its latest project at the BP Alaska Energy Center, an exhibit that provides visitors with a facility where they can experience content depicting Alaskan culture.
Working with sound designer Ben Rubin, Batwin + Robin created the media installation titled “The BP Story Pipeline.” The first component visitors see is an LED ribbon, flowing text, that winds throughout the woods in front of the BP Energy Center. The ribbon enters the building by seemingly piercing the glass wall of the entrance tube, and terminates in a large-scale video display of Alaska stories, where the pipeline's text is transformed into the spoken words of the onscreen storyteller. The installation displays a series of originally recorded and filmed oral histories about the people of Alaska.
Scharff Weisberg programmed, built, and installed the audio and visual components of the project. The video system is fed by three Adtec Soloist2 MPEG-2 players. One feeds a 50" NEC 50PD2 plasma display oriented in portrait mode primarily to display the many storytellers who narrate each storyline. The other two provide content to two NEC GT-1150 video projectors providing rear-projected images that display supporting imagery. Six Turbosound TCS-30 speakers, three QSC amplifiers, one Crown USM-810 mixer, and one Tannoy B475 subwoofer have been installed in the exhibit area to provide multichannel program audio.
“We are proud to have been involved with this project, as it is one of the most technologically advanced A/V systems in the state and will function as a real showpiece for them,” says Scharff Weisberg project manger David Girgenti. “The custom control software that our engineer, Serguei Kozlovski, designed and programmed allowed us to maintain the cost-effectiveness of this system while still possessing the features of a more costly off-the-shelf control system.”