4Wall Takes On 30 Sites At BLINK 2026 With Disguise, LightAct, PIXERA, And Panasonic

CINCINNATI, OH - "What is BLINK? That's a big question," said Mathew Leland, VP of Special Projects at 4Wall Entertainment. 

Every other October, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky hand their churches, office towers, murals, and parks over to artists for four nights, with more than two million people attending this year’s event. For its second BLINK, 4Wall handled 30 sites across Cincinnati and Covington. Some sites featured complex building mappings while others had flat, projected murals. A few sites had no projection on them at all and relied on lighting displays alone. The largest site was Music Hall, where 4Wall supplied, installed, and operated the projection, a large lighting rig, and an audio system. 

The equipment package filled seven trailers and included over 90 projectors, 20+ servers, 25 video racks, and more than 600 lights. Disguise, PIXERA, LightAct and Panasonic Connect all donated equipment for the festival. 28 leads from 4Wall and over 60 IATSE Local 5 technicians were tasked with setting up and running the event. 

"We brought in the programmers, the technologists, the projectionists, and the electricians from around the country to put the festival on and make sure that we were able to succeed," said Danielowski, BLINK lighting designer and VP of Special Projects at 4Wall. 

How it started 

"We started this process in January," said Will Jennings, Director of Special Projects at 4Wall and lead project manager for BLINK. "We did several different site visits to measure the surface area of the buildings." 

The first of those visits came in February, when the team measured each building, picked scaffolding locations for the projectors, and ran projector studies to confirm each surface would get enough brightness and resolution. Then certain buildings were modeled in 3D so the artists could start building out the content. 

"Projection mapping has come a long way. These days, everything is 3D," Leland said. "We actually put a LiDAR scanner on a drone and scanned the entire building. We then went back and rebuilt that in a three-dimensional world and then templatized it in a way that the artists could work on it and be creative." 

Those templates went to about 45 content creators nearly half a year before the event started. Some are internationally known projection mapping artists. Others were local artists, or graphic design students from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, taking on their first building project. From early spring until load-in, 4Wall ran previs and QC with them so the content would hold up when displayed on the real architecture. Ben Nicholson, 4Wall's artistic partner on the festival, handled communication with the artists. While the artists worked, logistics such as labor and equipment needs and power calculations were being worked out.  

Having done this once already helped the 4Wall team immensely. After 2024, 4Wall held a long post-mortem, internally and with the BLINK team. 

"In general, 2024 went very well, so there weren't any drastic changes, but there were many small adjustments," Jennings said. 

A few scaffolding towers moved. Some changed height or configuration. The crew plan with Local 5 got refined, and the advance went deeper on crew hospitality and on more efficient ways of moving people from one site to the next. 

Show prep 

Prep happened at 4Wall's New York shop the week before load-in. The 25 video racks for the projection sites went together first. Then the projection, lighting, and audio teams came in, tested and dialed in all the equipment, and sorted everything by site, labeling and color-coding as they went. 

Seven trailers carried the full package to the First Financial Center, Cincinnati's convention center, which served as the trucking and distribution home base. From there, two trucks ran local deliveries to each of the 30 sites. 

"Labeling and color coding was a priority since we have to truck everything to a central location and then distribute to each individual jobsite," Jennings said. "It was crucial that we were very clear with what gear goes where." 

Show site 

BLINK’s build was unique in that the crew was working across 30 sites, in two cities, and at businesses that were still open and operating as the rigs went up. The projector towers went up in public areas, and telehandlers lifted the projectors onto their scaffolding platforms. That meant closing roads while the lifts worked and staying in close contact with local law enforcement and with David Marmanillo of Cinematic, the event's lead producer and 4Wall's logistics partner. 

"We needed to block off certain roads for our telehandlers to be able to raise the projectors to their scaffolding platforms, so we just needed to have awareness and patience," Jennings said. 

Project managers, local labor, and heavy equipment were shared across all 30 sites. Three regional project managers split the work, and every PM and department lead carried a cellular radio. The leads from 4Wall worked alongside technicians from IATSE Local 5, who supplied riggers, video, lighting, and audio technicians, equipment operators, and loaders. 4Wall stayed in constant contact with the Local 5 steward to move crew wherever the day needed them. 

Music Hall 

Music Hall was designed to be a hot spot for festivalgoers. 4Wall handled the projection on the façade, hung a large lighting rig, installed the audio system, and then ran all of it each night. The Music Hall Experience featured work from Brett Bolton, Jonas Denzel, Silent Partners Studio, and Strangeloop. 

Bolton, a Las Vegas-based artist and drummer, played live at Music Hall, and his drum kit drove the visuals. This unique setup ran on Disguise's new GX 3+ server, built on NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture. Leland described the performance: 

"The new GX 3+ boxes, the Blackwell cards, it was pretty incredible the amount of sheer horsepower that we could hand back to someone like Brett Bolton. He was live on a stage, triggering video live from his drum kit with a guitarist and affecting what we were seeing on this giant 200-foot-wide template, completely generative and interactive, all to audio as though we were at a concert." 

The audio package was built around d&b audiotechnik V-Series and Y-Series line arrays, mixed on a Yamaha QL1. 

Lighting a city 

For Danielowski, the most challenging lighting problem was the range and scope. 

"Lighting up an entire city was a challenge," he said. "For instance, Music Hall, we had a site that has video, audio, and lighting to really punch up the excitement and drive a narrative. Then you get to sites like OneNKY, where we only had lighting, and it had to stand on its own." 

The OneNKY Center in downtown Covington had no projection to lean on. Back across the river on Cincinnati's riverfront, the Cincinnati Black Music Walk of Fame sits just outside the Andrew J Brady Music Center. That’s where 4Wall lit Asha Ama's Voyage to Atlantis fashion show with Elation Proteus Excaliburs, long-throw IP65 beam fixtures that were new to 4Wall's BLINK rig this year. 

"It was interesting lighting the fashion show at Black Music Walk of Fame, being able to use the back wall of the Music Center and bring that forward to bridge the gap between the Music Center and the Walk of Fame," Danielowski said. "Those lights really punched into the sky and gave us a lot of power." 

Garfield Place was trickier. Piatt Park, the city's oldest park, runs two blocks down Garfield Place and ends across Elm Street from Covenant-First Presbyterian Church, the canvas for work by Ana Tomashvili, Felix Frank, and Mindscape Studio. 4Wall's lighting installation in the park led the crowd straight to it. 

"Garfield was an interesting challenge," Danielowski said. "We had this underwater disco that led right up into Covenant-First Church. It really was a cohesive moment all the way through, even though they're two very separate pieces of art." 

Lighting ran mostly on grandMA3 consoles, and each night the crews brought the rigs up and started the festival cue sequence. 

Disguise, PIXERA, LightAct and Panasonic 

No single media server platform ran every projection site. 4Wall matched each one to Disguise, PIXERA, LightAct, or Hive based on how many projectors it needed and how much total resolution it had to push. 

Disguise came in as the festival's official media server partner. The Disguise lineup included GX 1 servers with Notch playback, EX 3+, VX 2, VX 4, and the new GX 3+.  

"We had to have absolute trust in the software that we were using," Leland said. "We had to know the tools are there, and that's what Disguise offered us." 

PIXERA and LightAct servers were utilized at specific sites where the buildings were architecturally complex.  4Wall programmers worked with the AV Stumpfl (Pixera) and LightAct teams to showcase different workflows and projection mapping at those sites. 

Panasonic supplied the PT-RQ45K, a native 4K, 3-chip DLP laser projector that allowed for a brighter and clearer projection than 2024.