The Dumbo Arts Festival is an annually recurring festival to highlight Brooklyn’s commitment to and presence in the arts community by presenting the best in local, national, and international art amid the breathtaking backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline.
Part of the festival, held on 28, 29 and 30 September 2012, was Codex Dynamic, a large-scale video projection exhibition curated by Leo Kuelbs and John Ensor Parker. WorldStage sponsored and supported Codex Dynamic, transforming the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage and Archway into display surfaces supporting work by well-known and up-and-coming media artists. The theme of the media content was man’s evolving relationship with time and space. The highly successful festival had more than 225,000 people visiting.
“The Dumbo Arts Festival has a unique setting: a combination of gritty urban warehouses, cobblestones, and the Manhattan Bridge itself,” says WorldStage president Josh Weisberg, who grew up in the neighbourhood and still lives nearby. “To transform the bridge structure into a media canvas is remarkable. Its great Archway span can look forbidding at night, but project video on it, and get thousands of people to watch, and it’s just the coolest thing.” Nationwide Video Equipment Rental worked closely with WorldStage to fill out the equipment package.
Real-time simulation and playback control was provided by 10 x d3 4U servers; 1 Pure Master, 5 Slaves and 4 Understudies. In total 28 unique d3 outputs were used.
The real-time simulation feature became extremely important not only from a technical point-of-view but foremost for the content creators themselves who immediately could view their content in real-time. Using d3’s Projector Simulation toolkit Worldstage could specify what projectors and what lenses to use meaning all 28 outputs were lined up on sight within 2 nights, by only 2 operators.
As each d3 4U output can reach up to a 2560×1920 resolution, Datapaths x4’s were used for four outputs, enabling 16 × 1280×960 outputs. All the remaining outputs were sending natively 1400×1050 resolutions.
16 Christie Digital Roadster S+10K-M projectors were used for the inside tunnel mapping along with 4 Christie HD 10K-M projectors for the PIP windows and single-channel video inside the tunnel and 6 Roadster S+16K projectors handled the outside wall and archway.
Equipment List:
- 10x d3 4U v2.5
- 16 Christie Digital Roadster S+10K-M projectors
- 4 Christie HD 10K-M projectors
- 6 Roadster S+16K projectors
Design Team:
- Curated by: Leo Kuelbs and John Ensor Parker
- Content by: Integrated Visions and John Ensor Parker & Glowing Bulbs
- AV production by: Worldstage and Nationwide Video Equipment Rental
- Lead projectionists: Juan Mateo and MojoVideoTech
- d3 Project setup by: Farkas Fülöp
- d3 on-site assistance: Nils Porrmann and Luke Collins